How Phished Data Turns into Apple & Google Wallets

Carding — the underground business of stealing, selling and swiping stolen payment card data — has long been the dominion of Russia-based hackers. Happily, the broad deployment of more secure chip-based payment cards in the United States has weakened the carding market. But a flurry of innovation from cybercrime groups in China is breathing new life into the carding industry, by turning phished card data into mobile wallets that can be used online and at main street stores.

If you own a mobile phone, the chances are excellent that at some point in the past two years it has received at least one phishing message that spoofs the U.S. Postal Service to supposedly collect some outstanding delivery fee, or an SMS that pretends to be a local toll road operator warning of a delinquent toll fee.

These messages are being sent through sophisticated phishing kits sold by several cybercriminals based in mainland China. And they are not traditional SMS phishing or “smishing” messages, as they bypass the mobile networks entirely. Rather, the missives are sent through the Apple iMessage service and through RCS, the functionally equivalent technology on Google phones.

People who enter their payment card data at one of these sites will be told their financial institution needs to verify the small transaction by sending a one-time passcode to the customer’s mobile device. In reality, that code will be sent by the victim’s financial institution to verify that the user indeed wishes to link their card information to a mobile wallet.

If the victim then provides that one-time code, the phishers will link the card data to a new mobile wallet from Apple or Google, loading the wallet onto a mobile phone that the scammers control.

CARDING REINVENTED

Ford Merrill works in security research at SecAlliance, a CSIS Security Group company. Merrill has been studying the evolution of several China-based smishing gangs, and found that most of them feature helpful and informative video tutorials in their sales accounts on Telegram. Those videos show the thieves are loading multiple stolen digital wallets on a single mobile device, and then selling those phones in bulk for hundreds of dollars apiece.

“Who says carding is dead?,” said Merrill, who presented about his findings at the M3AAWG security conference in Lisbon earlier today. “This is the best mag stripe cloning device ever. This threat actor is saying you need to buy at least 10 phones, and they’ll air ship them to you.”

One promotional video shows stacks of milk crates stuffed full of phones for sale. A closer inspection reveals that each phone is affixed with a handwritten notation that typically references the date its mobile wallets were added, the number of wallets on the device, and the initials of the seller.

Merrill said one common way criminal groups in China are cashing out with these stolen mobile wallets involves setting up fake e-commerce businesses on Stripe or Zelle and running transactions through those entities — often for amounts totaling between $100 and $500.

Merrill said that when these phishing groups first began operating in earnest two years ago, they would wait between 60 to 90 days before selling the phones or using them for fraud. But these days that waiting period is more like just seven to ten days, he said.

“When they first installed this, the actors were very patient,” he said. “Nowadays, they only wait like 10 days before [the wallets] are hit hard and fast.”

GHOST TAP

Criminals also can cash out mobile wallets by obtaining real point-of-sale terminals and using tap-to-pay on phone after phone. But they also offer a more cutting-edge mobile fraud technology: Merrill found that at least one of the Chinese phishing groups sells an Android app called “ZNFC” that can relay a valid NFC transaction to anywhere in the world. The user simply waves their phone at a local payment terminal that accepts Apple or Google pay, and the app relays an NFC transaction over the Internet from a phone in China.

“The software can work from anywhere in the world,” Merrill said. “These guys provide the software for $500 a month, and it can relay both NFC enabled tap-to-pay as well as any digital wallet. The even have 24-hour support.”

The rise of so-called “ghost tap” mobile software was first documented in November 2024 by security experts at ThreatFabric. Andy Chandler, the company’s chief commercial officer, said their researchers have since identified a number of criminal groups from different regions of the world latching on to this scheme.

Chandler said those include organized crime gangs in Europe that are using similar mobile wallet and NFC attacks to take money out of ATMs made to work with smartphones.

“No one is talking about it, but we’re now seeing ten different methodologies using the same modus operandi, and none of them are doing it the same,” Chandler said. “This is much bigger than the banks are prepared to say.”

A November 2024 story in the Singapore daily The Straits Times reported authorities there arrested three foreign men who were recruited in their home countries via social messaging platforms, and given ghost tap apps with which to purchase expensive items from retailers, including mobile phones, jewelry, and gold bars.

“Since Nov 4, at least 10 victims who had fallen for e-commerce scams have reported unauthorised transactions totaling more than $100,000 on their credit cards for purchases such as electronic products, like iPhones and chargers, and jewelry in Singapore,” The Straits Times wrote, noting that in another case with a similar modus operandi, the police arrested a Malaysian man and woman on Nov 8.

ADVANCED PHISHING TECHNIQUES

According to Merrill, the phishing pages that spoof the USPS and various toll road operators are powered by several innovations designed to maximize the extraction of victim data.

For example, a would-be smishing victim might enter their personal and financial information, but then decide the whole thing is scam before actually submitting the data. In this case, anything typed into the data fields of the phishing page will be captured in real time, regardless of whether the visitor actually clicks the “submit” button.

Merrill said people who submit payment card data to these phishing sites often are then told their card can’t be processed, and urged to use a different card. This technique, he said, sometimes allows the phishers to steal more than one mobile wallet per victim.

Many phishing websites expose victim data by storing the stolen information directly on the phishing domain. But Merrill said these Chinese phishing kits will forward all victim data to a back-end database operated by the phishing kit vendors. That way, even when the smishing sites get taken down for fraud, the stolen data is still safe and secure.

Another important innovation is the use of mass-created Apple and Google user accounts through which these phishers send their spam messages. One of the Chinese phishing groups posted images on their Telegram sales channels showing how these robot Apple and Google accounts are loaded onto Apple and Google phones, and arranged snugly next to each other in an expansive, multi-tiered rack that sits directly in front of the phishing service operator.

In other words, the smishing websites are powered by real human operators as long as new messages are being sent. Merrill said the criminals appear to send only a few dozen messages at a time, likely because completing the scam takes manual work by the human operators in China. After all, most one-time codes used for mobile wallet provisioning are generally only good for a few minutes before they expire.

Notably, none of the phishing sites spoofing the toll operators or postal services will load in a regular Web browser; they will only render if they detect that a visitor is coming from a mobile device.

“One of the reasons they want you to be on a mobile device is they want you to be on the same device that is going to receive the one-time code,” Merrill said. “They also want to minimize the chances you will leave. And if they want to get that mobile tokenization and grab your one-time code, they need a live operator.”

Merrill found the Chinese phishing kits feature another innovation that makes it simple for customers to turn stolen card details into a mobile wallet: They programmatically take the card data supplied by the phishing victim and convert it into a digital image of a real payment card that matches that victim’s financial institution. That way, attempting to enroll a stolen card into Apple Pay, for example, becomes as easy as scanning the fabricated card image with an iPhone.

“The phone isn’t smart enough to know whether it’s a real card or just an image,” Merrill said. “So it scans the card into Apple Pay, which says okay we need to verify that you’re the owner of the card by sending a one-time code.”

PROFITS

How profitable are these mobile phishing kits? The best guess so far comes from data gathered by other security researchers who’ve been tracking these advanced Chinese phishing vendors.

In August 2023, the security firm Resecurity discovered a vulnerability in one popular Chinese phish kit vendor’s platform that exposed the personal and financial data of phishing victims. Resecurity dubbed the group the Smishing Triad, and found the gang had harvested 108,044 payment cards across 31 phishing domains (3,485 cards per domain).

In August 2024, security researcher Grant Smith gave a presentation at the DEFCON security conference about tracking down the Smishing Triad after scammers spoofing the U.S. Postal Service duped his wife. By identifying a different vulnerability in the gang’s phishing kit, Smith said he was able to see that people entered 438,669 unique credit cards in 1,133 phishing domains (387 cards per domain).

Based on his research, Merrill said it’s reasonable to expect between $100 and $500 in losses on each card that is turned into a mobile wallet. Merrill said they observed nearly 33,000 unique domains tied to these Chinese smishing groups during the year between the publication of Resecurity’s research and Smith’s DEFCON talk.

Using a median number of 1,935 cards per domain and a conservative loss of $250 per card, that comes out to about $15 billion in fraudulent charges over a year.

Merrill was reluctant to say whether he’d identified additional security vulnerabilities in any of the phishing kits sold by the Chinese groups, noting that the phishers quickly fixed the vulnerabilities that were detailed publicly by Resecurity and Smith.

FIGHTING BACK

Adoption of touchless payments took off in the United States after the Coronavirus pandemic emerged, and many financial institutions in the United States were eager to make it simple for customers to link payment cards to mobile wallets. Thus, the authentication requirement for doing so defaulted to sending the customer a one-time code via SMS.

Experts say the continued reliance on one-time codes for onboarding mobile wallets has fostered this new wave of carding. KrebsOnSecurity interviewed a security executive from a large European financial institution who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

That expert said the lag between the phishing of victim card data and its eventual use for fraud has left many financial institutions struggling to correlate the causes of their losses.

“That’s part of why the industry as a whole has been caught by surprise,” the expert said. “A lot of people are asking, how this is possible now that we’ve tokenized a plaintext process. We’ve never seen the volume of sending and people responding that we’re seeing with these phishers.”

To improve the security of digital wallet provisioning, some banks in Europe and Asia require customers to log in to the bank’s mobile app before they can link a digital wallet to their device.

Addressing the ghost tap threat may require updates to contactless payment terminals, to better identify NFC transactions that are being relayed from another device. But experts say it’s unrealistic to expect retailers will be eager to replace existing payment terminals before their expected lifespans expire.

And of course Apple and Google have an increased role to play as well, given that their accounts are being created en masse and used to blast out these smishing messages. Both companies could easily tell which of their devices suddenly have 7-10 different mobile wallets added from 7-10 different people around the world. They could also recommend that financial institutions use more secure authentication methods for mobile wallet provisioning.

Neither Apple nor Google responded to requests for comment on this story.

Nearly a Year Later, Mozilla is Still Promoting OneRep

In mid-March 2024, KrebsOnSecurity revealed that the founder of the personal data removal service Onerep also founded dozens of people-search companies. Shortly after that investigation was published, Mozilla said it would stop bundling Onerep with the Firefox browser and wind down its partnership with the company. But nearly a year later, Mozilla is still promoting it to Firefox users.

Mozilla offers Onerep to Firefox users on a subscription basis as part of Mozilla Monitor Plus. Launched in 2018 under the name Firefox Monitor, Mozilla Monitor also checks data from the website Have I Been Pwned? to let users know when their email addresses or password are leaked in data breaches.

The ink on that partnership agreement had barely dried before KrebsOnSecurity published a story showing that Onerep’s Belarusian CEO and founder Dimitiri Shelest launched dozens of people-search services since 2010, including a still-active data broker called Nuwber that sells background reports on people. This seemed to contradict Onerep’s stated motto, “We believe that no one should compromise personal online security and get a profit from it.”

Shelest released a lengthy statement (PDF) wherein he acknowledged maintaining an ownership stake in Nuwber, a consumer data broker he founded in 2015 — around the same time he started Onerep.

Shelest maintained that Nuwber has “zero cross-over or information-sharing with Onerep,” and said any other old domains that may be found and associated with his name are no longer being operated by him.

“I get it,” Shelest wrote. “My affiliation with a people search business may look odd from the outside. In truth, if I hadn’t taken that initial path with a deep dive into how people search sites work, Onerep wouldn’t have the best tech and team in the space. Still, I now appreciate that we did not make this more clear in the past and I’m aiming to do better in the future.”

When asked to comment on the findings, Mozilla said then that although customer data was never at risk, the outside financial interests and activities of Onerep’s CEO did not align with their values.

“We’re working now to solidify a transition plan that will provide customers with a seamless experience and will continue to put their interests first,” Mozilla said.

In October 2024, Mozilla published a statement saying the search for a different provider was taking longer than anticipated.

“While we continue to evaluate vendors, finding a technically excellent and values-aligned partner takes time,” Mozilla wrote. “While we continue this search, Onerep will remain the backend provider, ensuring that we can maintain uninterrupted services while we continue evaluating new potential partners that align more closely with Mozilla’s values and user expectations. We are conducting thorough diligence to find the right vendor.”

Asked for an update, Mozilla said the search for a replacement partner continues.

“The work’s ongoing but we haven’t found the right alternative yet,” Mozilla said in an emailed statement. “Our customers’ data remains safe, and since the product provides a lot of value to our subscribers, we’ll continue to offer it during this process.”

It’s a win-win for Mozilla that they’ve received accolades for their principled response while continuing to partner with Onerep almost a year later. But if it takes so long to find a suitable replacement, what does that say about the personal data removal industry itself?

Onerep appears to be working in partnership with another problematic people-search service: Radaris, which has a history of ignoring opt-out requests or failing to honor them. A week before breaking the story about Onerep, KrebsOnSecurity published research showing the co-founders of Radaris were two native Russian brothers who’d built a vast network of affiliate marketing programs and consumer data broker services.

Lawyers for the Radaris co-founders threatened to sue KrebsOnSecurity unless that story was retracted in full, claiming the founders were in fact Ukrainian and that our reporting had defamed the brothers by associating them with the actions of Radaris. Instead, we published a follow-up investigation which showed that not only did the brothers from Russia create Radaris, for many years they issued press releases quoting a fictitious CEO seeking money from investors.

Several readers have shared emails they received from Radaris after attempting to remove their personal data, and those messages show Radaris has been promoting Onerep.

Teen on Musk’s DOGE Team Graduated from ‘The Com’

Wired reported this week that a 19-year-old working for Elon Musk‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so. As today’s story explores, the DOGE teen is a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant collaboration.

Since President Trump’s second inauguration, Musk’s DOGE team has gained access to a truly staggering amount of personal and sensitive data on American citizens, moving quickly to seize control over databases at the U.S. Treasury, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Resources, among others.

Wired first reported on Feb. 2 that one of the technologists on Musk’s crew is a 19-year-old high school graduate named Edward Coristine, who reportedly goes by the nickname “Big Balls” online. One of the companies Coristine founded, Tesla.Sexy LLC, was set up in 2021, when he would have been around 16 years old.

“Tesla.Sexy LLC controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains,” Wired reported. “One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Helfie, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market. While the operation of a Russian website would not violate US sanctions preventing Americans doing business with Russian companies, it could potentially be a factor in a security clearance review.”

Mr. Coristine has not responded to requests for comment. In a follow-up story this week, Wired found that someone using a Telegram handle tied to Coristine solicited a DDoS-for-hire service in 2022, and that he worked for a short time at a company that specializes in protecting customers from DDoS attacks.

Internet routing records show that Coristine runs an Internet service provider called Packetware (AS400495). Also known as “DiamondCDN,” Packetware currently hosts tesla[.]sexy and diamondcdn[.]com, among other domains.

DiamondCDN was advertised and claimed by someone who used the nickname “Rivage” on several Com-based Discord channels over the years. A review of chat logs from some of those channels show other members frequently referred to Rivage as “Edward.”

From late 2020 to late 2024, Rivage’s conversations would show up in multiple Com chat servers that are closely monitored by security companies. In November 2022, Rivage could be seen requesting recommendations for a reliable and powerful DDoS-for-hire service.

Rivage made that request in the cybercrime channel “Dstat,” a core Com hub where users could buy and sell attack services. Dstat’s website dstat[.]cc was seized in 2024 as part of “Operation PowerOFF,” an international law enforcement action against DDoS services.

Coristine’s LinkedIn profile said that in 2022 he worked at an anti-DDoS company called Path Networks, which Wired generously described as a “network monitoring firm known for hiring reformed blackhat hackers.” Wired wrote:

“At Path Network, Coristine worked as a systems engineer from April to June of 2022, according to his now-deleted LinkedIn résumé. Path has at times listed as employees Eric Taylor, also known as Cosmo the God, a well-known former cybercriminal and member of the hacker group UGNazis, as well as Matthew Flannery, an Australian convicted hacker whom police allege was a member of the hacker group LulzSec. It’s unclear whether Coristine worked at Path concurrently with those hackers, and WIRED found no evidence that either Coristine or other Path employees engaged in illegal activity while at the company.”

The founder of Path is a young man named Marshal Webb. I wrote about Webb back in 2016, in a story about a DDoS defense company he co-founded called BackConnect Security LLC. On September 20, 2016, KrebsOnSecurity published data showing that the company had a history of hijacking Internet address space that belonged to others.

Less than 24 hours after that story ran, KrebsOnSecurity.com was hit with the biggest DDoS attack the Internet had ever seen at the time. That sustained attack kept this site offline for nearly 4 days.

The other founder of BackConnect Security LLC was Tucker Preston, a Georgia man who pleaded guilty in 2020 to paying a DDoS-for-hire service to launch attacks against others.

The aforementioned Path employee Eric Taylor pleaded guilty in 2017 to charges including an attack on our home in 2013. Taylor was among several men involved in making a false report to my local police department about a supposed hostage situation at our residence in Virginia. In response, a heavily-armed police force surrounded my home and put me in handcuffs at gunpoint before the police realized it was all a dangerous hoax known as “swatting.”

CosmoTheGod rocketed to Internet infamy in 2013 when he and a number of other hackers set up the Web site exposed[dot]su, which “doxed” dozens of public officials and celebrities by publishing the address, Social Security numbers and other personal information on the former First Lady Michelle Obama, the then-director of the FBI and the U.S. attorney general, among others. The group also swatted many of the people they doxed.

Wired noted that Coristine only worked at Path for a few months in 2022, but the story didn’t mention why his tenure was so short. A screenshot shared on the website pathtruths.com includes a snippet of conversations in June 2022 between Path employees discussing Coristine’s firing.

According to that record, Path founder Marshal Webb dismissed Coristine for leaking internal documents to a competitor. Not long after Coristine’s termination, someone leaked an abundance of internal Path documents and conversations. Among other things, those chats revealed that one of Path’s technicians was a Canadian man named Curtis Gervais who was convicted in 2017 of perpetrating dozens of swatting attacks and fake bomb threats — including at least two attempts against our home in 2014.

On May 11, 2024, Rivage posted on a Discord channel for a DDoS protection service that is chiefly marketed to members of The Com. Rivage expressed frustration with his time spent on Com-based communities, suggesting that its profitability had been oversold.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of money to be made in the com,” Rivage lamented. “I’m not buying Heztner [servers] to set up some com VPN.”

Rivage largely stopped posting messages on Com channels after that. Wired reports that Coristine subsequently spent three months last summer working at Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant startup.

The trouble with all this is that even if someone sincerely intends to exit The Com after years of consorting with cybercriminals, they are often still subject to personal attacks, harassment and hacking long after they have left the scene.

That’s because a huge part of Com culture involves harassing, swatting and hacking other members of the community. These internecine attacks are often for financial gain, but just as frequently they are perpetrated by cybercrime groups to exact retribution from or assert dominance over rival gangs.

Experts say it is extremely difficult for former members of violent street gangs to gain a security clearance needed to view sensitive or classified information held by the U.S. government. That’s because ex-gang members are highly susceptible to extortion and coercion from current members of the same gang, and that alone presents an unacceptable security risk for intelligence agencies.

And make no mistake: The Com is the English-language cybercriminal hacking equivalent of a violent street gang. KrebsOnSecurity has published numerous stories detailing how feuds within the community periodically spill over into real-world violence.

When Coristine’s name surfaced in Wired‘s report this week, members of The Com immediately took notice. In the following segment from a February 5, 2025 chat in a Com-affiliated hosting provider, members criticized Rivage’s skills, and discussed harassing his family and notifying authorities about incriminating accusations that may or may not be true.

2025-02-05 16:29:44 UTC vperked#0 they got this nigga on indiatimes man
2025-02-05 16:29:46 UTC alexaloo#0 Their cropping is worse than AI could have done
2025-02-05 16:29:48 UTC hebeatsme#0 bro who is that
2025-02-05 16:29:53 UTC hebeatsme#0 yalla re talking about
2025-02-05 16:29:56 UTC xewdy#0 edward
2025-02-05 16:29:56 UTC .yarrb#0 rivagew
2025-02-05 16:29:57 UTC vperked#0 Rivarge
2025-02-05 16:29:57 UTC xewdy#0 diamondcdm
2025-02-05 16:29:59 UTC vperked#0 i cant spell it
2025-02-05 16:30:00 UTC hebeatsme#0 rivage
2025-02-05 16:30:08 UTC .yarrb#0 yes
2025-02-05 16:30:14 UTC hebeatsme#0 i have him added
2025-02-05 16:30:20 UTC hebeatsme#0 hes on discord still
2025-02-05 16:30:47 UTC .yarrb#0 hes focused on stroking zaddy elon
2025-02-05 16:30:47 UTC vperked#0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Coristine
2025-02-05 16:30:50 UTC vperked#0 no fucking way
2025-02-05 16:30:53 UTC vperked#0 they even made a wiki for him
2025-02-05 16:30:55 UTC vperked#0 LOOOL
2025-02-05 16:31:05 UTC hebeatsme#0 no way
2025-02-05 16:31:08 UTC hebeatsme#0 hes not a good dev either
2025-02-05 16:31:14 UTC hebeatsme#0 like????
2025-02-05 16:31:22 UTC hebeatsme#0 has to be fake
2025-02-05 16:31:24 UTC xewdy#0 and theyre saying ts
2025-02-05 16:31:29 UTC xewdy#0 like ok bro
2025-02-05 16:31:51 UTC .yarrb#0 now i wanna know what all the other devs are like…
2025-02-05 16:32:00 UTC vperked#0 “`Coristine used the moniker “bigballs” on LinkedIn and @Edwardbigballer on Twitter, according to The Daily Dot.[“`
2025-02-05 16:32:05 UTC vperked#0 LOL
2025-02-05 16:32:06 UTC hebeatsme#0 lmfaooo
2025-02-05 16:32:07 UTC vperked#0 bro
2025-02-05 16:32:10 UTC hebeatsme#0 bro
2025-02-05 16:32:17 UTC hebeatsme#0 has to be fake right
2025-02-05 16:32:22 UTC .yarrb#0 does it mention Rivage?
2025-02-05 16:32:23 UTC xewdy#0 He previously worked for NeuraLink, a brain computer interface company led by Elon Musk
2025-02-05 16:32:26 UTC xewdy#0 bro what
2025-02-05 16:32:27 UTC alexaloo#0 I think your current occupation gives you a good insight of what probably goes on
2025-02-05 16:32:29 UTC hebeatsme#0 bullshit man
2025-02-05 16:32:33 UTC xewdy#0 this nigga got hella secrets
2025-02-05 16:32:37 UTC hebeatsme#0 rivage couldnt print hello world
2025-02-05 16:32:42 UTC hebeatsme#0 if his life was on the line
2025-02-05 16:32:50 UTC xewdy#0 nigga worked for neuralink
2025-02-05 16:32:54 UTC hebeatsme#0 bullshit
2025-02-05 16:33:06 UTC Nashville Dispatch ##0000 ||@PD Ping||
2025-02-05 16:33:07 UTC hebeatsme#0 must have killed all those test pigs with some bugs
2025-02-05 16:33:24 UTC hebeatsme#0 ur telling me the rivage who failed to start a company
2025-02-05 16:33:28 UTC hebeatsme#0 https://cdn.camp
2025-02-05 16:33:32 UTC hebeatsme#0 who didnt pay for servers
2025-02-05 16:33:34 UTC hebeatsme#0 ?
2025-02-05 16:33:42 UTC hebeatsme#0 was too cheap
2025-02-05 16:33:44 UTC vperked#0 yes
2025-02-05 16:33:50 UTC hebeatsme#0 like??
2025-02-05 16:33:53 UTC hebeatsme#0 it aint adding up
2025-02-05 16:33:56 UTC alexaloo#0 He just needed to find his calling idiot.
2025-02-05 16:33:58 UTC alexaloo#0 He found it.
2025-02-05 16:33:59 UTC hebeatsme#0 bro
2025-02-05 16:34:01 UTC alexaloo#0 Cope in a river dude
2025-02-05 16:34:04 UTC hebeatsme#0 he cant make good money right
2025-02-05 16:34:08 UTC hebeatsme#0 doge is about efficiency
2025-02-05 16:34:11 UTC hebeatsme#0 he should make $1/he
2025-02-05 16:34:15 UTC hebeatsme#0 $1/hr
2025-02-05 16:34:25 UTC hebeatsme#0 and be whipped for better code
2025-02-05 16:34:26 UTC vperked#0 prolly makes more than us
2025-02-05 16:34:35 UTC vperked#0 with his dad too
2025-02-05 16:34:52 UTC hebeatsme#0 time to report him for fraud
2025-02-05 16:34:54 UTC hebeatsme#0 to donald trump
2025-02-05 16:35:04 UTC hebeatsme#0 rivage participated in sim swap hacks in 2018
2025-02-05 16:35:08 UTC hebeatsme#0 put that on his wiki
2025-02-05 16:35:10 UTC hebeatsme#0 thanks
2025-02-05 16:35:15 UTC hebeatsme#0 and in 2021
2025-02-05 16:35:17 UTC hebeatsme#0 thanks
2025-02-05 16:35:19 UTC chainofcommand#0 i dont think they’ll care tbh

Given the speed with which Musk’s DOGE team was allowed access to such critical government databases, it strains credulity that Coristine could have been properly cleared beforehand. After all, he’d recently been dismissed from a job for allegedly leaking internal company information to outsiders.

According to the national security adjudication guidelines (PDF) released by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), eligibility determinations take into account a person’s stability, trustworthiness, reliability, discretion, character, honesty, judgment, and ability to protect classified information.

The DNI policy further states that “eligibility for covered individuals shall be granted only when facts and circumstances indicate that eligibility is clearly consistent with the national security interests of the United States, and any doubt shall be resolved in favor of national security.”

On Thursday, 25-year-old DOGE staff member Marko Elez resigned after being linked to a deleted social media account that advocated racism and eugenics. Elez resigned after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to the account.

“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” the account posted in July. “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” the account wrote on X in September. “Normalize Indian hate,” the account wrote the same month, in reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley.

Elez’s resignation came a day after the Department of Justice agreed to limit the number of DOGE employees who have access to federal payment systems. The DOJ said access would be limited to two people, Elez and Tom Krause, the CEO of a company called Cloud Software Group.

Earlier today, Musk said he planned to rehire Elez after President Trump and Vice President JD Vance reportedly endorsed the idea. Speaking at The White House today, Trump said he wasn’t concerned about the security of personal information and other data accessed by DOGE, adding that he was “very proud of the job that this group of young people” are doing.

A White House official told Reuters on Wednesday that Musk and his engineers have appropriate security clearances and are operating in “full compliance with federal law, appropriate security clearances, and as employees of the relevant agencies, not as outside advisors or entities.”

NPR reports Trump added that his administration’s cost-cutting efforts would soon turn to the Education Department and the Pentagon, “where he suggested without evidence that there could be ‘trillions’ of dollars in wasted spending within the $6.75 trillion the federal government spent in fiscal year 2024.”

GOP leaders in the Republican-controlled House and Senate have largely shrugged about Musk’s ongoing efforts to seize control over federal databases, dismantle agencies mandated by Congress, freeze federal spending on a range of already-appropriated government programs, and threaten workers with layoffs.

Meanwhile, multiple parties have sued to stop DOGE’s activities. ABC News says a federal judge was to rule today on whether DOGE should be blocked from accessing Department of Labor records, following a lawsuit alleging Musk’s team sought to illegally access highly sensitive data, including medical information, from the federal government.

At least 13 state attorneys general say they plan to file a lawsuit to stop DOGE from accessing federal payment systems containing Americans’ sensitive personal information, reports The Associated Press.

Reuters reported Thursday that the U.S. Treasury Department had agreed not to give Musk’s team access to its payment systems while a judge is hearing arguments in a lawsuit by employee unions and retirees alleging Musk illegally searched those records.

Ars Technica writes that The Department of Education (DoE) was sued Friday by a California student association demanding an “immediate stop” to DOGE’s “unlawfully” digging through student loan data to potentially dismantle the DoE.

Experts Flag Security, Privacy Risks in DeepSeek AI App

New mobile apps from the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek have remained among the top three “free” downloads for Apple and Google devices since their debut on Jan. 25, 2025. But experts caution that many of DeepSeek’s design choices — such as using hard-coded encryption keys, and sending unencrypted user and device data to Chinese companies — introduce a number of glaring security and privacy risks.

Public interest in the DeepSeek AI chat apps swelled following widespread media reports that the upstart Chinese AI firm had managed to match the abilities of cutting-edge chatbots while using a fraction of the specialized computer chips that leading AI companies rely on. As of this writing, DeepSeek is the third most-downloaded “free” app on the Apple store, and #1 on Google Play.

DeepSeek’s rapid rise caught the attention of the mobile security firm NowSecure, a Chicago-based company that helps clients screen mobile apps for security and privacy threats. In a teardown of the DeepSeek app published today, NowSecure urged organizations to remove the DeepSeek iOS mobile app from their environments, citing security concerns.

NowSecure founder Andrew Hoog said they haven’t yet concluded an in-depth analysis of the DeepSeek app for Android devices, but that there is little reason to believe its basic design would be functionally much different.

Hoog told KrebsOnSecurity there were a number of qualities about the DeepSeek iOS app that suggest the presence of deep-seated security and privacy risks. For starters, he said, the app collects an awful lot of data about the user’s device.

“They are doing some very interesting things that are on the edge of advanced device fingerprinting,” Hoog said, noting that one property of the app tracks the device’s name — which for many iOS devices defaults to the customer’s name followed by the type of iOS device.

The device information shared, combined with the user’s Internet address and data gathered from mobile advertising companies, could be used to deanonymize users of the DeepSeek iOS app, NowSecure warned. The report notes that DeepSeek communicates with Volcengine, a cloud platform developed by ByteDance (the makers of TikTok), although NowSecure said it wasn’t clear if the data is just leveraging ByteDance’s digital transformation cloud service or if the declared information share extends further between the two companies.

Perhaps more concerning, NowSecure said the iOS app transmits device information “in the clear,” without any encryption to encapsulate the data. This means the data being handled by the app could be intercepted, read, and even modified by anyone who has access to any of the networks that carry the app’s traffic.

“The DeepSeek iOS app globally disables App Transport Security (ATS) which is an iOS platform level protection that prevents sensitive data from being sent over unencrypted channels,” the report observed. “Since this protection is disabled, the app can (and does) send unencrypted data over the internet.”

Hoog said the app does selectively encrypt portions of the responses coming from DeepSeek servers. But they also found it uses an insecure and now deprecated encryption algorithm called 3DES (aka Triple DES), and that the developers had hard-coded the encryption key. That means the cryptographic key needed to decipher those data fields can be extracted from the app itself.

There were other, less alarming security and privacy issues highlighted in the report, but Hoog said he’s confident there are additional, unseen security concerns lurking within the app’s code.

“When we see people exhibit really simplistic coding errors, as you dig deeper there are usually a lot more issues,” Hoog said. “There is virtually no priority around security or privacy. Whether cultural, or mandated by China, or a witting choice, taken together they point to significant lapse in security and privacy controls, and that puts companies at risk.”

Apparently, plenty of others share this view. Axios reported on January 30 that U.S. congressional offices are being warned not to use the app.

“[T]hreat actors are already exploiting DeepSeek to deliver malicious software and infect devices,” read the notice from the chief administrative officer for the House of Representatives. “To mitigate these risks, the House has taken security measures to restrict DeepSeek’s functionality on all House-issued devices.”

TechCrunch reports that Italy and Taiwan have already moved to ban DeepSeek over security concerns. Bloomberg writes that The Pentagon has blocked access to DeepSeek. CNBC says NASA also banned employees from using the service, as did the U.S. Navy.

Beyond security concerns tied to the DeepSeek iOS app, there are indications the Chinese AI company may be playing fast and loose with the data that it collects from and about users. On January 29, researchers at Wiz said they discovered a publicly accessible database linked to DeepSeek that exposed “a significant volume of chat history, backend data and sensitive information, including log streams, API secrets, and operational details.”

“More critically, the exposure allowed for full database control and potential privilege escalation within the DeepSeek environment, without any authentication or defense mechanism to the outside world,” Wiz wrote. [Full disclosure: Wiz is currently an advertiser on this website.]

KrebsOnSecurity sought comment on the report from DeepSeek and from Apple. This story will be updated with any substantive replies.

Who’s Behind the Seized Forums ‘Cracked’ & ‘Nulled’?

The FBI joined authorities across Europe last week in seizing domain names for Cracked and Nulled, English-language cybercrime forums with millions of users that trafficked in stolen data, hacking tools and malware. An investigation into the history of these communities shows their apparent co-founders quite openly operate an Internet service provider and a pair of e-commerce platforms catering to buyers and sellers on both forums.

On Jan. 30, the U.S. Department of Justice said it seized eight domain names that were used to operate Cracked, a cybercrime forum that sprang up in 2018 and attracted more than four million users. The DOJ said the law enforcement action, dubbed Operation Talent, also seized domains tied to Sellix, Cracked’s payment processor.

In addition, the government seized the domain names for two popular anonymity services that were heavily advertised on Cracked and Nulled and allowed customers to rent virtual servers: StarkRDP[.]io, and rdp[.]sh.

Those archived webpages show both RDP services were owned by an entity called 1337 Services Gmbh. According to corporate records compiled by Northdata.com, 1337 Services GmbH is also known as AS210558 and is incorporated in Hamburg, Germany.

The Cracked forum administrator went by the nicknames “FlorainN” and “StarkRDP” on multiple cybercrime forums. Meanwhile, a LinkedIn profile for a Florian M. from Germany refers to this person as the co-founder of Sellix and founder of 1337 Services GmbH.

Northdata’s business profile for 1337 Services GmbH shows the company is controlled by two individuals: 32-year-old Florian Marzahl and Finn Alexander Grimpe, 28.

Neither Marzahl nor Grimpe responded to requests for comment. But Grimpe’s first name is interesting because it corresponds to the nickname chosen by the founder of Nulled, who goes by the monikers “Finn” and “Finndev.” NorthData reveals that Grimpe was the founder of a German entity called DreamDrive GmbH, which rented out high-end sports cars and motorcycles.

According to the cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, a user named Finndev registered on multiple cybercrime forums, including Raidforums [seized by the FBI in 2022], Void[.]to, and vDOS, a DDoS-for-hire service that was shut down in 2016 after its founders were arrested.

The email address used for those accounts was f.grimpe@gmail.com. DomainTools.com reports f.grimpe@gmail.com was used to register at least nine domain names, including nulled[.]lol and nulled[.]it. Neither of these domains were among those seized in Operation Talent.

Intel471 finds the user FlorainN registered across multiple cybercrime forums using the email address olivia.messla@outlook.de. The breach tracking service Constella Intelligence says this email address used the same password (and slight variations of it) across many accounts online — including at hacker forums — and that the same password was used in connection with dozens of other email addresses, such as florianmarzahl@hotmail.de, and fmarzahl137@gmail.com.

The Justice Department said the Nulled marketplace had more than five million members, and has been selling stolen login credentials, stolen identification documents and hacking services, as well as tools for carrying out cybercrime and fraud, since 2016.

Perhaps fittingly, both Cracked and Nulled have been hacked over the years, exposing countless private messages between forum users. A review of those messages archived by Intel 471 showed that dozens of early forum members referred privately to Finndev as the owner of shoppy[.]gg, an e-commerce platform that caters to the same clientele as Sellix.

Shoppy was not targeted as part of Operation Talent, and its website remains online. Northdata reports that Shoppy’s business name — Shoppy Ecommerce Ltd. — is registered at an address in Gan-Ner, Israel, but there is no ownership information about this entity. Shoppy did not respond to requests for comment.

Constella found that a user named Shoppy registered on Cracked in 2019 using the email address finn@shoppy[.]gg. Constella says that email address is tied to a Twitter/X account for Shoppy Ecommerce in Israel.

The DOJ said one of the alleged administrators of Nulled, a 29-year-old Argentinian national named Lucas Sohn, was arrested in Spain. The government has not announced any other arrests or charges associated with Operation Talent.

Indeed, both StarkRDP and FloraiN have posted to their accounts on Telegram that there were no charges levied against the proprietors of 1337 Services GmbH. FlorainN told former customers they were in the process of moving to a new name and domain for StarkRDP, where existing accounts and balances would be transferred.

“StarkRDP has always been operating by the law and is not involved in any of these alleged crimes and the legal process will confirm this,” the StarkRDP Telegram account wrote on January 30. “All of your servers are safe and they have not been collected in this operation. The only things that were seized is the website server and our domain. Unfortunately, no one can tell who took it and with whom we can talk about it. Therefore, we will restart operation soon, under a different name, to close the chapter [of] ‘StarkRDP.'”

FBI, Dutch Police Disrupt ‘Manipulaters’ Phishing Gang

The FBI and authorities in The Netherlands this week seized dozens of servers and domains for a hugely popular spam and malware dissemination service operating out of Pakistan. The proprietors of the service, who use the collective nickname “The Manipulaters,” have been the subject of three stories published here since 2015. The FBI said the main clientele are organized crime groups that try to trick victim companies into making payments to a third party.

On January 29, the FBI and the Dutch national police seized the technical infrastructure for a cybercrime service marketed under the brands Heartsender, Fudpage and Fudtools (and many other “fud” variations). The “fud” bit stands for “Fully Un-Detectable,” and it refers to cybercrime resources that will evade detection by security tools like antivirus software or anti-spam appliances.

The Dutch authorities said 39 servers and domains abroad were seized, and that the servers contained millions of records from victims worldwide — including at least 100,000 records pertaining to Dutch citizens.

A statement from the U.S. Department of Justice refers to the cybercrime group as Saim Raza, after a pseudonym The Manipulaters communally used to promote their spam, malware and phishing services on social media.

“The Saim Raza-run websites operated as marketplaces that advertised and facilitated the sale of tools such as phishing kits, scam pages and email extractors often used to build and maintain fraud operations,” the DOJ explained.

The core Manipulaters product is Heartsender, a spam delivery service whose homepage openly advertised phishing kits targeting users of various Internet companies, including Microsoft 365, Yahoo, AOL, Intuit, iCloud and ID.me, to name a few.

The government says transnational organized crime groups that purchased these services primarily used them to run business email compromise (BEC) schemes, wherein the cybercrime actors tricked victim companies into making payments to a third party.

“Those payments would instead be redirected to a financial account the perpetrators controlled, resulting in significant losses to victims,” the DOJ wrote. “These tools were also used to acquire victim user credentials and utilize those credentials to further these fraudulent schemes. The seizure of these domains is intended to disrupt the ongoing activity of these groups and stop the proliferation of these tools within the cybercriminal community.”

KrebsOnSecurity first wrote about The Manipulaters in May 2015, mainly because their ads at the time were blanketing a number of popular cybercrime forums, and because they were fairly open and brazen about what they were doing — even who they were in real life.

We caught up with The Manipulaters again in 2021, with a story that found the core employees had started a web coding company in Lahore called WeCodeSolutions — presumably as a way to account for their considerable Heartsender income. That piece examined how WeCodeSolutions employees had all doxed themselves on Facebook by posting pictures from company parties each year featuring a large cake with the words FudCo written in icing.

A follow-up story last year about The Manipulaters prompted messages from various WeCodeSolutions employees who pleaded with this publication to remove stories about them. The Saim Raza identity told KrebsOnSecurity they were recently released from jail after being arrested and charged by local police, although they declined to elaborate on the charges.

The Manipulaters never seemed to care much about protecting their own identities, so it’s not surprising that they were unable or unwilling to protect their own customers. In an analysis released last year, DomainTools.com found the web-hosted version of Heartsender leaked an extraordinary amount of user information to unauthenticated users, including customer credentials and email records from Heartsender employees.

DomainTools also uncovered evidence that the computers used by The Manipulaters were all infected with the same password-stealing malware, and that vast numbers of credentials were stolen from the group and sold online.

“Ironically, the Manipulaters may create more short-term risk to their own customers than law enforcement,” DomainTools wrote. “The data table ‘User Feedbacks’ (sic) exposes what appear to be customer authentication tokens, user identifiers, and even a customer support request that exposes root-level SMTP credentials–all visible by an unauthenticated user on a Manipulaters-controlled domain.”

Police in The Netherlands said the investigation into the owners and customers of the service is ongoing.

“The Cybercrime Team is on the trail of a number of buyers of the tools,” the Dutch national police said. “Presumably, these buyers also include Dutch nationals. The investigation into the makers and buyers of this phishing software has not yet been completed with the seizure of the servers and domains.”

U.S. authorities this week also joined law enforcement in Australia, France, Greece, Italy, Romania and Spain in seizing a number of domains for several long-running cybercrime forums and services, including Cracked and Nulled. According to a statement from the European police agency Europol, the two communities attracted more than 10 million users in total.

Other domains seized as part of “Operation Talent” included Sellix, an e-commerce platform that was frequently used by cybercrime forum members to buy and sell illicit goods and services.

Infrastructure Laundering: Blending in with the Cloud

In an effort to blend in and make their malicious traffic tougher to block, hosting firms catering to cybercriminals in China and Russia increasingly are funneling their operations through major U.S. cloud providers. Research published this week on one such outfit — a sprawling network tied to Chinese organized crime gangs and aptly named “Funnull” — highlights a persistent whac-a-mole problem facing cloud services.

In October 2024, the security firm Silent Push published a lengthy analysis of how Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure were providing services to Funnull, a two-year-old Chinese content delivery network that hosts a wide variety of fake trading apps, pig butchering scams, gambling websites, and retail phishing pages.

Funnull made headlines last summer after it acquired the domain name polyfill[.]io, previously the home of a widely-used open source code library that allowed older browsers to handle advanced functions that weren’t natively supported. There were still tens of thousands of legitimate domains linking to the Polyfill domain at the time of its acquisition, and Funnull soon after conducted a supply-chain attack that redirected visitors to malicious sites.

Silent Push’s October 2024 report found a vast number of domains hosted via Funnull promoting gambling sites that bear the logo of the Suncity Group, a Chinese entity named in a 2024 UN report (PDF) for laundering millions of dollars for the North Korean Lazarus Group.

In 2023, Suncity’s CEO was sentenced to 18 years in prison on charges of fraud, illegal gambling, and “triad offenses,” i.e. working with Chinese transnational organized crime syndicates. Suncity is alleged to have built an underground banking system that laundered billions of dollars for criminals.

It is likely the gambling sites coming through Funnull are abusing top casino brands as part of their money laundering schemes. In reporting on Silent Push’s October report, TechCrunch obtained a comment from Bwin, one of the casinos being advertised en masse through Funnull, and Bwin said those websites did not belong to them.

Gambling is illegal in China except in Macau, a special administrative region of China. Silent Push researchers say Funnull may be helping online gamblers in China evade the Communist party’s “Great Firewall,” which blocks access to gambling destinations.

Silent Push’s Zach Edwards said that upon revisiting Funnull’s infrastructure again this month, they found dozens of the same Amazon and Microsoft cloud Internet addresses still forwarding Funnull traffic through a dizzying chain of auto-generated domain names before redirecting malicious or phishous websites.

Edwards said Funnull is a textbook example of an increasing trend Silent Push calls “infrastructure laundering,” wherein crooks selling cybercrime services will relay some or all of their malicious traffic through U.S. cloud providers.

“It’s crucial for global hosting companies based in the West to wake up to the fact that extremely low quality and suspicious web hosts based out of China are deliberately renting IP space from multiple companies and then mapping those IPs to their criminal client websites,” Edwards told KrebsOnSecurity. “We need these major hosts to create internal policies so that if they are renting IP space to one entity, who further rents it to host numerous criminal websites, all of those IPs should be reclaimed and the CDN who purchased them should be banned from future IP rentals or purchases.”

Reached for comment, Amazon referred this reporter to a statement Silent Push included in a report released today. Amazon said AWS was already aware of the Funnull addresses tracked by Silent Push, and that it had suspended all known accounts linked to the activity.

Amazon said that contrary to implications in the Silent Push report, it has every reason to aggressively police its network against this activity, noting the accounts tied to Funnull used “fraudulent methods to temporarily acquire infrastructure, for which it never pays. Thus, AWS incurs damages as a result of the abusive activity.”

“When AWS’s automated or manual systems detect potential abuse, or when we receive reports of potential abuse, we act quickly to investigate and take action to stop any prohibited activity,” Amazon’s statement continues. “In the event anyone suspects that AWS resources are being used for abusive activity, we encourage them to report it to AWS Trust & Safety using the report abuse form. In this case, the authors of the report never notified AWS of the findings of their research via our easy-to-find security and abuse reporting channels. Instead, AWS first learned of their research from a journalist to whom the researchers had provided a draft.”

Microsoft likewise said it takes such abuse seriously, and encouraged others to report suspicious activity found on its network.

“We are committed to protecting our customers against this kind of activity and actively enforce acceptable use policies when violations are detected,” Microsoft said in a written statement. “We encourage reporting suspicious activity to Microsoft so we can investigate and take appropriate actions.”

Richard Hummel is threat intelligence lead at NETSCOUT. Hummel said it used to be that “noisy” and frequently disruptive malicious traffic — such as automated application layer attacks, and “brute force” efforts to crack passwords or find vulnerabilities in websites — came mostly from botnets, or large collections of hacked devices.

But he said the vast majority of the infrastructure used to funnel this type of traffic is now proxied through major cloud providers, which can make it difficult for organizations to block at the network level.

“From a defenders point of view, you can’t wholesale block cloud providers, because a single IP can host thousands or tens of thousands of domains,” Hummel said.

In May 2024, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive on Stark Industries Solutions, an ISP that materialized at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and has been used as a global proxy network that conceals the true source of cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns against enemies of Russia. Experts said much of the malicious traffic  traversing Stark’s network (e.g. vulnerability scanning and password brute force attacks) was being bounced through U.S.-based cloud providers.

Stark’s network has been a favorite of the Russian hacktivist group called NoName057(16), which frequently launches huge distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against a variety of targets seen as opposed to Moscow. Hummel said NoName’s history suggests they are adept at cycling through new cloud provider accounts, making anti-abuse efforts into a game of whac-a-mole.

“It almost doesn’t matter if the cloud provider is on point and takes it down because the bad guys will just spin up a new one,” he said. “Even if they’re only able to use it for an hour, they’ve already done their damage. It’s a really difficult problem.”

Edwards said Amazon declined to specify whether the banned Funnull users were operating using compromised accounts or stolen payment card data, or something else.

“I’m surprised they wanted to lean into ‘We’ve caught this 1,200+ times and have taken these down!’ and yet didn’t connect that each of those IPs was mapped to [the same] Chinese CDN,” he said. “We’re just thankful Amazon confirmed that account mules are being used for this and it isn’t some front-door relationship. We haven’t heard the same thing from Microsoft but it’s very likely that the same thing is happening.”

Funnull wasn’t always a bulletproof hosting network for scam sites. Prior to 2022, the network was known as Anjie CDN, based in the Philippines. One of Anjie’s properties was a website called funnull[.]app. Loading that domain reveals a pop-up message by the original Anjie CDN owner, who said their operations had been seized by an entity known as Fangneng CDN and ACB Group, the parent company of Funnull.

“After I got into trouble, the company was managed by my family,” the message explains. “Because my family was isolated and helpless, they were persuaded by villains to sell the company. Recently, many companies have contacted my family and threatened them, believing that Fangneng CDN used penetration and mirroring technology through customer domain names to steal member information and financial transactions, and stole customer programs by renting and selling servers. This matter has nothing to do with me and my family. Please contact Fangneng CDN to resolve it.”

In January 2024, the U.S. Department of Commerce issued a proposed rule that would require cloud providers to create a “Customer Identification Program” that includes procedures to collect data sufficient to determine whether each potential customer is a foreign or U.S. person.

According to the law firm Crowell & Moring LLP, the Commerce rule also would require “infrastructure as a service” (IaaS) providers to report knowledge of any transactions with foreign persons that might allow the foreign entity to train a large AI model with potential capabilities that could be used in malicious cyber-enabled activity.

“The proposed rulemaking has garnered global attention, as its cross-border data collection requirements are unprecedented in the cloud computing space,” Crowell wrote. “To the extent the U.S. alone imposes these requirements, there is concern that U.S. IaaS providers could face a competitive disadvantage, as U.S. allies have not yet announced similar foreign customer identification requirements.”

It remains unclear if the new White House administration will push forward with the requirements. The Commerce action was mandated as part of an executive order President Trump issued a day before leaving office in January 2021.

A Tumultuous Week for Federal Cybersecurity Efforts

President Trump last week issued a flurry of executive orders that upended a number of government initiatives focused on improving the nation’s cybersecurity posture. The president fired all advisors from the Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Safety Review Board, called for the creation of a strategic cryptocurrency reserve, and voided a Biden administration action that sought to reduce the risks that artificial intelligence poses to consumers, workers and national security.

On his first full day back in the White House, Trump dismissed all 15 advisory committee members of the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB), a nonpartisan government entity established in February 2022 with a mandate to investigate the causes of major cybersecurity events. The CSRB has so far produced three detailed reports, including an analysis of the Log4Shell vulnerability crisis, attacks from the cybercrime group LAPSUS$, and the 2023 Microsoft Exchange Online breach.

The CSRB was in the midst of an inquiry into cyber intrusions uncovered recently across a broad spectrum of U.S. telecommunications providers at the hands of Chinese state-sponsored hackers. One of the CSRB’s most recognizable names is Chris Krebs (no relation), the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Krebs was fired by President Trump in November 2020 for declaring the presidential contest was the most secure in American history, and for refuting Trump’s false claims of election fraud.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, confirmed by the U.S. Senate last week as the new director of the DHS, criticized CISA at her confirmation hearing, TheRecord reports.

Noem told lawmakers CISA needs to be “much more effective, smaller, more nimble, to really fulfill their mission,” which she said should be focused on hardening federal IT systems and hunting for digital intruders. Noem said the agency’s work on fighting misinformation shows it has “gotten far off mission” and involved “using their resources in ways that was never intended.”

“The misinformation and disinformation that they have stuck their toe into and meddled with, should be refocused back onto what their job is,” she said.

Moses Frost, a cybersecurity instructor with the SANS Institute, compared the sacking of the CSRB members to firing all of the experts at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) while they’re in the middle of an investigation into a string of airline disasters.

“I don’t recall seeing an ‘NTSB Board’ being fired during the middle of a plane crash investigation,” Frost said in a recent SANS newsletter. “I can say that the attackers in the phone companies will not stop because the review board has gone away. We do need to figure out how these attacks occurred, and CISA did appear to be doing some good for the vast majority of the federal systems.”

Speaking of transportation, The Record notes that Transportation Security Administration chief David Pekoske was fired despite overseeing critical cybersecurity improvements across pipeline, rail and aviation sectors. Pekoske was appointed by Trump in 2017 and had his 5-year tenure renewed in 2022 by former President Joe Biden.

AI & CRYPTOCURRENCY

Shortly after being sworn in for a second time, Trump voided a Biden executive order that focused on supporting research and development in artificial intelligence. The previous administration’s order on AI was crafted with an eye toward managing the safety and security risks introduced by the technology. But a statement released by the White House said Biden’s approach to AI had hindered development, and that the United States would support AI systems that are “free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas,” to maintain leadership.

The Trump administration issued its own executive order on AI, which calls for an “AI Action Plan” to be led by the assistant to the president for science and technology, the White House “AI & crypto czar,” and the national security advisor. It also directs the White House to revise and reissue policies to federal agencies on the government’s acquisition and governance of AI “to ensure that harmful barriers to America’s AI leadership are eliminated.”

Trump’s AI & crypto czar is David Sacks, an entrepreneur and Silicon Valley venture capitalist who argues that the Biden administration’s approach to AI and cryptocurrency has driven innovation overseas. Sacks recently asserted that non-fungible cryptocurrency tokens and memecoins are neither securities nor commodities, but rather should be treated as “collectibles” like baseball cards and stamps.

There is already a legal definition of collectibles under the U.S. tax code that applies to things like art or antiques, which can be subject to high capital gains taxes. But Joe Hall, a capital markets attorney and partner at Davis Polk, told Fortune there are no market regulations that apply to collectibles under U.S. securities law. Hall said Sacks’ comments “suggest a viewpoint that it would not be appropriate to regulate these things the way we regulate securities.”

The new administration’s position makes sense considering that the Trump family is deeply and personally invested in a number of recent memecoin ventures that have attracted billions from investors. President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump each launched their own vanity memecoins this month, dubbed $TRUMP and $MELANIA.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday the market capitalization of $TRUMP stood at about $7 billion, down from a peak of near $15 billion, while $MELANIA is hovering somewhere in the $460 million mark. Just two months before the 2024 election, Trump’s three sons debuted a cryptocurrency token called World Liberty Financial.

Despite maintaining a considerable personal stake in how cryptocurrency is regulated, Trump issued an executive order on January 23 calling for a working group to be chaired by Sacks that would develop “a federal regulatory framework governing digital assets, including stablecoins,” and evaluate the creation of a “strategic national digital assets stockpile.”

Translation: Using taxpayer dollars to prop up the speculative, volatile, and highly risky cryptocurrency industry, which has been marked by endless scams, rug-pulls, 8-figure cyber heists, rampant fraud, and unrestrained innovations in money laundering.

WEAPONIZATION & DISINFORMATION

Prior to the election, President Trump frequently vowed to use a second term to exact retribution against his perceived enemies. Part of that promise materialized in an executive order Trump issued last week titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” which decried “an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process,” in the prosecution of more than 1,500 people who invaded the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

On Jan. 21, Trump commuted the sentences of several leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who were convicted of seditious conspiracy. He also issued “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021,” which include those who assaulted law enforcement officers.

The New York Times reports “the language of the document suggests — but does not explicitly state — that the Trump administration review will examine the actions of local district attorneys or state officials, such as the district attorneys in Manhattan or Fulton County, Ga., or the New York attorney general, all of whom filed cases against President Trump.”

Another Trump order called “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” asserts:

“Over the last 4 years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve,” the Trump administration alleged. “Under the guise of combatting ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.”

Both of these executive orders have potential implications for security, privacy and civil liberties activists who have sought to track conspiracy theories and raise awareness about disinformation efforts on social media coming from U.S. adversaries.

In the wake of the 2020 election, Republicans created the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Led by GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the committee’s stated purpose was to investigate alleged collusion between the Biden administration and tech companies to unconstitutionally shut down political speech.

The GOP committee focused much of its ire at members of the short-lived Disinformation Governance Board, an advisory board to DHS created in 2022 (the “combating misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” quote from Trump’s executive order is a reference to the board’s stated mission). Conservative groups seized on social media posts made by the director of the board, who resigned after facing death threats. The board was dissolved by DHS soon after.

In his first administration, President Trump created a special prosecutor to probe the origins of the FBI’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives seeking to influence the 2016 election. Part of that inquiry examined evidence gathered by some of the world’s most renowned cybersecurity experts who identified frequent and unexplained communications between an email server used by the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, one of Russia’s largest financial institutions.

Trump’s Special Prosecutor John Durham later subpoenaed and/or deposed dozens of security experts who’d collected, viewed or merely commented on the data. Similar harassment and deposition demands would come from lawyers for Alfa Bank. Durham ultimately indicted Michael Sussman, the former federal cybercrime prosecutor who reported the oddity to the FBI. Sussman was acquitted in May 2022. Last week, Trump appointed Durham to lead the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, NY.

Quinta Jurecic at Lawfare notes that while the executive actions are ominous, they are also vague, and could conceivably generate either a campaign of retaliation, or nothing at all.

“The two orders establish that there will be investigations but leave open the questions of what kind of investigations, what will be investigated, how long this will take, and what the consequences might be,” Jurecic wrote. “It is difficult to draw firm conclusions as to what to expect. Whether this ambiguity is intentional or the result of sloppiness or disagreement within Trump’s team, it has at least one immediate advantage as far as the president is concerned: generating fear among the broad universe of potential subjects of those investigations.”

On Friday, Trump moved to fire at least 17 inspectors general, the government watchdogs who conduct audits and investigations of executive branch actions, and who often uncover instances of government waste, fraud and abuse. Lawfare’s Jack Goldsmith argues that the removals are probably legal even though Trump defied a 2022 law that required congressional notice of the terminations, which Trump did not give.

“Trump probably acted lawfully, I think, because the notice requirement is probably unconstitutional,” Goldsmith wrote. “The real bite in the 2022 law, however, comes in the limitations it places on Trump’s power to replace the terminated IGs—limitations that I believe are constitutional. This aspect of the law will make it hard, but not impossible, for Trump to put loyalists atop the dozens of vacant IG offices around the executive branch. The ultimate fate of IG independence during Trump 2.0, however, depends less on legal protections than on whether Congress, which traditionally protects IGs, stands up for them now. Don’t hold your breath.”

Among the many Biden administration executive orders revoked by President Trump last week was an action from December 2021 establishing the United States Council on Transnational Organized Crime, which is charged with advising the White House on a range of criminal activities, including drug and weapons trafficking, migrant smuggling, human trafficking, cybercrime, intellectual property theft, money laundering, wildlife and timber trafficking, illegal fishing, and illegal mining.

So far, the White House doesn’t appear to have revoked an executive order that former President Biden issued less than a week before President Trump took office. On Jan. 16, 2025, Biden released a directive that focused on improving the security of federal agencies and contractors, and giving the government more power to sanction the hackers who target critical infrastructure.

MasterCard DNS Error Went Unnoticed for Years

The payment card giant MasterCard just fixed a glaring error in its domain name server settings that could have allowed anyone to intercept or divert Internet traffic for the company by registering an unused domain name. The misconfiguration persisted for nearly five years until a security researcher spent $300 to register the domain and prevent it from being grabbed by cybercriminals.

From June 30, 2020 until January 14, 2025, one of the core Internet servers that MasterCard uses to direct traffic for portions of the mastercard.com network was misnamed. MasterCard.com relies on five shared Domain Name System (DNS) servers at the Internet infrastructure provider Akamai [DNS acts as a kind of Internet phone book, by translating website names to numeric Internet addresses that are easier for computers to manage].

All of the Akamai DNS server names that MasterCard uses are supposed to end in “akam.net” but one of them was misconfigured to rely on the domain “akam.ne.”

This tiny but potentially critical typo was discovered recently by Philippe Caturegli, founder of the security consultancy Seralys. Caturegli said he guessed that nobody had yet registered the domain akam.ne, which is under the purview of the top-level domain authority for the West Africa nation of Niger.

Caturegli said it took $300 and nearly three months of waiting to secure the domain with the registry in Niger. After enabling a DNS server on akam.ne, he noticed hundreds of thousands of DNS requests hitting his server each day from locations around the globe. Apparently, MasterCard wasn’t the only organization that had fat-fingered a DNS entry to include “akam.ne,” but they were by far the largest.

Had he enabled an email server on his new domain akam.ne, Caturegli likely would have received wayward emails directed toward mastercard.com or other affected domains. If he’d abused his access, he probably could have obtained website encryption certificates (SSL/TLS certs) that were authorized to accept and relay web traffic for affected websites. He may even have been able to passively receive Microsoft Windows authentication credentials from employee computers at affected companies.

But the researcher said he didn’t attempt to do any of that. Instead, he alerted MasterCard that the domain was theirs if they wanted it, copying this author on his notifications. A few hours later, MasterCard acknowledged the mistake, but said there was never any real threat to the security of its operations.

“We have looked into the matter and there was not a risk to our systems,” a MasterCard spokesperson wrote. “This typo has now been corrected.”

Meanwhile, Caturegli received a request submitted through Bugcrowd, a program that offers financial rewards and recognition to security researchers who find flaws and work privately with the affected vendor to fix them. The message suggested his public disclosure of the MasterCard DNS error via a post on LinkedIn (after he’d secured the akam.ne domain) was not aligned with ethical security practices, and passed on a request from MasterCard to have the post removed.

Caturegli said while he does have an account on Bugcrowd, he has never submitted anything through the Bugcrowd program, and that he reported this issue directly to MasterCard.

“I did not disclose this issue through Bugcrowd,” Caturegli wrote in reply. “Before making any public disclosure, I ensured that the affected domain was registered to prevent exploitation, mitigating any risk to MasterCard or its customers. This action, which we took at our own expense, demonstrates our commitment to ethical security practices and responsible disclosure.”

Most organizations have at least two authoritative domain name servers, but some handle so many DNS requests that they need to spread the load over additional DNS server domains. In MasterCard’s case, that number is five, so it stands to reason that if an attacker managed to seize control over just one of those domains they would only be able to see about one-fifth of the overall DNS requests coming in.

But Caturegli said the reality is that many Internet users are relying at least to some degree on public traffic forwarders or DNS resolvers like Cloudflare and Google.

“So all we need is for one of these resolvers to query our name server and cache the result,” Caturegli said. By setting their DNS server records with a long TTL or “Time To Live” — a setting that can adjust the lifespan of data packets on a network — an attacker’s poisoned instructions for the target domain can be propagated by large cloud providers.

“With a long TTL, we may reroute a LOT more than just 1/5 of the traffic,” he said.

The researcher said he’d hoped that the credit card giant might thank him, or at least offer to cover the cost of buying the domain.

“We obviously disagree with this assessment,” Caturegli wrote in a follow-up post on LinkedIn regarding MasterCard’s public statement. “But we’ll let you judge— here are some of the DNS lookups we recorded before reporting the issue.”

As the screenshot above shows, the misconfigured DNS server Caturegli found involved the MasterCard subdomain az.mastercard.com. It is not clear exactly how this subdomain is used by MasterCard, however their naming conventions suggest the domains correspond to production servers at Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. Caturegli said the domains all resolve to Internet addresses at Microsoft.

“Don’t be like Mastercard,” Caturegli concluded in his LinkedIn post. “Don’t dismiss risk, and don’t let your marketing team handle security disclosures.”

One final note: The domain akam.ne has been registered previously — in December 2016 by someone using the email address um-i-delo@yandex.ru. The Russian search giant Yandex reports this user account belongs to an “Ivan I.” from Moscow. Passive DNS records from DomainTools.com show that between 2016 and 2018 the domain was connected to an Internet server in Germany, and that the domain was left to expire in 2018.

This is interesting given a comment on Caturegli’s LinkedIn post from an ex-Cloudflare employee who linked to a report he co-authored on a similar typo domain apparently registered in 2017 for organizations that may have mistyped their AWS DNS server as “awsdns-06.ne” instead of “awsdns-06.net.” DomainTools reports that this typo domain also was registered to a Yandex user (playlotto@yandex.ru), and was hosted at the same German ISP — Team Internet (AS61969).

Chinese Innovations Spawn Wave of Toll Phishing Via SMS

Residents across the United States are being inundated with text messages purporting to come from toll road operators like E-ZPass, warning that recipients face fines if a delinquent toll fee remains unpaid. Researchers say the surge in SMS spam coincides with new features added to a popular commercial phishing kit sold in China that makes it simple to set up convincing lures spoofing toll road operators in multiple U.S. states.

Last week, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) warned residents to be on the lookout for a new SMS phishing or “smishing” scam targeting users of EZDriveMA, MassDOT’s all electronic tolling program. Those who fall for the scam are asked to provide payment card data, and eventually will be asked to supply a one-time password sent via SMS or a mobile authentication app.

Reports of similar SMS phishing attacks against customers of other U.S. state-run toll facilities surfaced around the same time as the MassDOT alert. People in Florida reported receiving SMS phishing that spoofed Sunpass, Florida’s prepaid toll program.

In Texas, residents said they received text messages about unpaid tolls with the North Texas Toll Authority. Similar reports came from readers in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, and Washington. This is by no means a comprehensive list.

In each case, the emergence of these SMS phishing attacks coincided with the release of new phishing kit capabilities that closely mimic these toll operator websites as they appear on mobile devices. Notably, none of the phishing pages will even load unless the website detects that the visitor is coming from a mobile device.

Ford Merrill works in security research at SecAlliance, a CSIS Security Group company. Merrill said the volume of SMS phishing attacks spoofing toll road operators skyrocketed after the New Year, when at least one Chinese cybercriminal group known for selling sophisticated SMS phishing kits began offering new phishing pages designed to spoof toll operators in various U.S. states.

According to Merrill, multiple China-based cybercriminals are selling distinct SMS-based phishing kits that each have hundreds or thousands of customers. The ultimate goal of these kits, he said, is to phish enough information from victims that their payment cards can be added to mobile wallets and used to buy goods at physical stores, online, or to launder money through shell companies.

Merrill said the different purveyors of these SMS phishing tools traditionally have impersonated shipping companies, customs authorities, and even governments with tax refund lures and visa or immigration renewal scams targeting people who may be living abroad or new to a country.

“What we’re seeing with these tolls scams is just a continuation of the Chinese smishing groups rotating from package redelivery schemes to toll road scams,” Merrill said. “Every one of us by now is sick and tired of receiving these package smishing attacks, so now it’s a new twist on an existing scam.”

In October 2023, KrebsOnSecurity wrote about a massive uptick in SMS phishing scams targeting U.S. Postal Service customers. That story revealed the surge was tied to innovations introduced by “Chenlun,” a mainland China-based proprietor of a popular phishing kit and service. At the time, Chenlun had just introduced new phishing pages made to impersonate postal services in the United States and at least a dozen other countries.

SMS phishing kits are hardly new, but Merrill said Chinese smishing groups recently have introduced innovations in deliverability, by more seamlessly integrating their spam messages with Apple’s iMessage technology, and with RCS, the equivalent “rich text” messaging capability built into Android devices.

“While traditional smishing kits relied heavily on SMS for delivery, nowadays the actors make heavy use of iMessage and RCS because telecom operators can’t filter them and they likely have a higher success rate with these delivery channels,” he said.

It remains unclear how the phishers have selected their targets, or from where their data may be sourced. A notice from MassDOT cautions that “the targeted phone numbers seem to be chosen at random and are not uniquely associated with an account or usage of toll roads.”

Indeed, one reader shared on Mastodon yesterday that they’d received one of these SMS phishing attacks spoofing a local toll operator, when they didn’t even own a vehicle.

Targeted or not, these phishing websites are dangerous because they are operated dynamically in real-time by criminals. If you receive one of these messages, just ignore it or delete it, but please do not visit the phishing site. The FBI asks that before you bin the missives, consider filing a complaint with the agency’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), including the phone number where the text originated, and the website listed within the text.

A Day in the Life of a Prolific Voice Phishing Crew

Besieged by scammers seeking to phish user accounts over the telephone, Apple and Google frequently caution that they will never reach out unbidden to users this way. However, new details about the internal operations of a prolific voice phishing gang show the group routinely abuses legitimate services at Apple and Google to force a variety of outbound communications to their users, including emails, automated phone calls and system-level messages sent to all signed-in devices.

KrebsOnSecurity recently told the saga of a cryptocurrency investor named Tony who was robbed of more than $4.7 million in an elaborate voice phishing attack. In Tony’s ordeal, the crooks appear to have initially contacted him via Google Assistant, an AI-based service that can engage in two-way conversations. The phishers also abused legitimate Google services to send Tony an email from google.com, and to send a Google account recovery prompt to all of his signed-in devices.

Today’s story pivots off of Tony’s heist and new details shared by a scammer to explain how these voice phishing groups are abusing a legitimate Apple telephone support line to generate “account confirmation” message prompts from Apple to their customers.

Before we get to the Apple scam in detail, we need to revisit Tony’s case. The phishing domain used to steal roughly $4.7 million in cryptocurrencies from Tony was verify-trezor[.]io. This domain was featured in a writeup from February 2024 by the security firm Lookout, which found it was one of dozens being used by a prolific and audacious voice phishing group it dubbed “Crypto Chameleon.”

Crypto Chameleon was brazenly trying to voice phish employees at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), as well as those working at the cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase and Binance. Lookout researchers discovered multiple voice phishing groups were using a new phishing kit that closely mimicked the single sign-on pages for Okta and other authentication providers.

As we’ll see in a moment, that phishing kit is operated and rented out by a cybercriminal known as “Perm” a.k.a. “Annie.” Perm is the current administrator of Star Fraud, one of the more consequential cybercrime communities on Telegram and one that has emerged as a foundry of innovation in voice phishing attacks.

A review of the many messages that Perm posted to Star Fraud and other Telegram channels showed they worked closely with another cybercriminal who went by the handles “Aristotle” and just “Stotle.”

It is not clear what caused the rift, but at some point last year Stotle decided to turn on his erstwhile business partner Perm, sharing extremely detailed videos, tutorials and secrets that shed new light on how these phishing panels operate.

Stotle explained that the division of spoils from each robbery is decided in advance by all participants. Some co-conspirators will be paid a set fee for each call, while others are promised a percentage of any overall amount stolen. The person in charge of managing or renting out the phishing panel to others will generally take a percentage of each theft, which in Perm’s case is 10 percent.

When the phishing group settles on a target of interest, the scammers will create and join a new Discord channel. This allows each logged on member to share what is currently on their screen, and these screens are tiled in a series of boxes so that everyone can see all other call participant screens at once.

Each participant in the call has a specific role, including:

-The Caller: The person speaking and trying to social engineer the target.
-The Operator: The individual managing the phishing panel, silently moving the victim from page to page.
-The Drainer: The person who logs into compromised accounts to drain the victim’s funds.
-The Owner: The phishing panel owner, who will frequently listen in on and participate in scam calls.

‘OKAY, SO THIS REALLY IS APPLE’

In one video of a live voice phishing attack shared by Stotle, scammers using Perm’s panel targeted a musician in California. Throughout the video, we can see Perm monitoring the conversation and operating the phishing panel in the upper right corner of the screen.

In the first step of the attack, they peppered the target’s Apple device with notifications from Apple by attempting to reset his password. Then a “Michael Keen” called him, spoofing Apple’s phone number and saying they were with Apple’s account recovery team.

The target told Michael that someone was trying to change his password, which Michael calmly explained they would investigate. Michael said he was going to send a prompt to the man’s device, and proceeded to place a call to an automated line that answered as Apple support saying, “I’d like to send a consent notification to your Apple devices. Do I have permission to do that?”

In this segment of the video, we can see the operator of the panel is calling the real Apple customer support phone number 800-275-2273, but they are doing so by spoofing the target’s phone number (the victim’s number is redacted in the video above). That’s because calling this support number from a phone number tied to an Apple account and selecting “1” for “yes” will then send an alert from Apple that displays the following message on all associated devices:

KrebsOnSecurity asked two different security firms to test this using the caller ID spoofing service shown in Perm’s video, and sure enough calling that 800 number for Apple by spoofing my phone number as the source caused the Apple Account Confirmation to pop up on all of my signed-in Apple devices.

In essence, the voice phishers are using an automated Apple phone support line to send notifications from Apple and to trick people into thinking they’re really talking with Apple. The phishing panel video leaked by Stotle shows this technique fooled the target, who felt completely at ease that he was talking to Apple after receiving the support prompt on his iPhone.

“Okay, so this really is Apple,” the man said after receiving the alert from Apple. “Yeah, that’s definitely not me trying to reset my password.”

“Not a problem, we can go ahead and take care of this today,” Michael replied. “I’ll go ahead and prompt your device with the steps to close out this ticket. Before I do that, I do highly suggest that you change your password in the settings app of your device.”

The target said they weren’t sure exactly how to do that. Michael replied “no problem,” and then described how to change the account password, which the man said he did on his own device. At this point, the musician was still in control of his iCloud account.

“Password is changed,” the man said. “I don’t know what that was, but I appreciate the call.”

“Yup,” Michael replied, setting up the killer blow. “I’ll go ahead and prompt you with the next step to close out this ticket. Please give me one moment.”

The target then received a text message that referenced information about his account, stating that he was in a support call with Michael. Included in the message was a link to a website that mimicked Apple’s iCloud login page — 17505-apple[.]com. Once the target navigated to the phishing page, the video showed Perm’s screen in the upper right corner opening the phishing page from their end.

“Oh okay, now I log in with my Apple ID?,” the man asked.

“Yup, then just follow the steps it requires, and if you need any help, just let me know,” Michael replied.

As the victim typed in their Apple password and one-time passcode at the fake Apple site, Perm’s screen could be seen in the background logging into the victim’s iCloud account.

It’s unclear whether the phishers were able to steal any cryptocurrency from the victim in this case, who did not respond to requests for comment. However, shortly after this video was recorded, someone leaked several music recordings stolen from the victim’s iCloud account.

At the conclusion of the call, Michael offered to configure the victim’s Apple profile so that any further changes to the account would need to happen in person at a physical Apple store. This appears to be one of several scripted ploys used by these voice phishers to gain and maintain the target’s confidence.

A tutorial shared by Stotle titled “Social Engineering Script” includes a number of tips for scam callers that can help establish trust or a rapport with their prey. When the callers are impersonating Coinbase employees, for example, they will offer to sign the user up for the company’s free security email newsletter.

“Also, for your security, we are able to subscribe you to Coinbase Bytes, which will basically give you updates to your email about data breaches and updates to your Coinbase account,” the script reads. “So we should have gone ahead and successfully subscribed you, and you should have gotten an email confirmation. Please let me know if that is the case. Alright, perfect.”

In reality, all they are doing is entering the target’s email address into Coinbase’s public email newsletter signup page, but it’s a remarkably effective technique because it demonstrates to the would-be victim that the caller has the ability to send emails from Coinbase.com.

Asked to comment for this story, Apple said there has been no breach, hack, or technical exploit of iCloud or Apple services, and that the company is continuously adding new protections to address new and emerging threats. For example, it said it has implemented rate limiting for multi-factor authentication requests, which have been abused by voice phishing groups to impersonate Apple.

Apple said its representatives will never ask users to provide their password, device passcode, or two-factor authentication code or to enter it into a web page, even if it looks like an official Apple website. If a user receives a message or call that claims to be from Apple, here is what the user should expect.

AUTODOXERS

According to Stotle, the target lists used by their phishing callers originate mostly from a few crypto-related data breaches, including the 2022 and 2024 breaches involving user account data stolen from cryptocurrency hardware wallet vendor Trezor.

Perm’s group and other crypto phishing gangs rely on a mix of homemade code and third-party data broker services to refine their target lists. Known as “autodoxers,” these tools help phishing gangs quickly automate the acquisition and/or verification of personal data on a target prior to each call attempt.

Stotle said their autodoxer used a Telegram bot that leverages hacked accounts at consumer data brokers to gather a wealth of information about their targets, including their full Social Security number, date of birth, current and previous addresses, employer, and the names of family members.

The autodoxers are used to verify that each email address on a target list has an active account at Coinbase or another cryptocurrency exchange, ensuring that the attackers don’t waste time calling people who have no cryptocurrency to steal.

Some of these autodoxer tools also will check the value of the target’s home address at property search services online, and then sort the target lists so that the wealthiest are at the top.

CRYPTO THIEVES IN THE SHARK TANK

Stotle’s messages on Discord and Telegram show that a phishing group renting Perm’s panel voice-phished tens of thousands of dollars worth of cryptocurrency from the billionaire Mark Cuban.

“I was an idiot,” Cuban told KrebsOnsecurity when asked about the June 2024 attack, which he first disclosed in a short-lived post on Twitter/X. “We were shooting Shark Tank and I was rushing between pitches.”

Cuban said he first received a notice from Google that someone had tried to log in to his account. Then he got a call from what appeared to be a Google phone number. Cuban said he ignored several of these emails and calls until he decided they probably wouldn’t stop unless he answered.

“So I answered, and wasn’t paying enough attention,” he said. “They asked for the circled number that comes up on the screen. Like a moron, I gave it to them, and they were in.”

Unfortunately for Cuban, somewhere in his inbox were the secret “seed phrases” protecting two of his cryptocurrency accounts, and armed with those credentials the crooks were able to drain his funds. All told, the thieves managed to steal roughly $43,000 worth of cryptocurrencies from Cuban’s wallets — a relatively small heist for this crew.

“They must have done some keyword searches,” once inside his Gmail account, Cuban said. “I had sent myself an email I had forgotten about that had my seed words for 2 accounts that weren’t very active any longer. I had moved almost everything but some smaller balances to Coinbase.”

LIFE IS A GAME: MONEY IS HOW WE KEEP SCORE

Cybercriminals involved in voice phishing communities on Telegram are universally obsessed with their crypto holdings, mainly because in this community one’s demonstrable wealth is primarily what confers social status. It is not uncommon to see members sizing one another up using a verbal shorthand of “figs,” as in figures of crypto wealth.

For example, a low-level caller with no experience will sometimes be mockingly referred to as a 3fig or 3f, as in a person with less than $1,000 to their name. Salaries for callers are often also referenced this way, e.g. “Weekly salary: 5f.”

Voice phishing groups frequently require new members to provide “proof of funds” — screenshots of their crypto holdings, ostensibly to demonstrate they are not penniless — before they’re allowed to join.

This proof of funds (POF) demand is typical among thieves selling high-dollar items, because it tends to cut down on the time-wasting inquiries from criminals who can’t afford what’s for sale anyway. But it has become so common in cybercrime communities that there are now several services designed to create fake POF images and videos, allowing customers to brag about large crypto holdings without actually possessing said wealth.

Several of the phishing panel videos shared by Stotle feature audio that suggests co-conspirators were practicing responses to certain call scenarios, while other members of the phishing group critiqued them or tried disrupt their social engineering by being verbally abusive.

These groups will organize and operate for a few weeks, but tend to disintegrate when one member of the conspiracy decides to steal some or all of the loot, referred to in these communities as “snaking” others out of their agreed-upon sums. Almost invariably, the phishing groups will splinter apart over the drama caused by one of these snaking events, and individual members eventually will then re-form a new phishing group.

Allison Nixon is the chief research officer for Unit 221B, a cybersecurity firm in New York that has worked on a number of investigations involving these voice phishing groups. Nixon said the constant snaking within the voice phishing circles points to a psychological self-selection phenomenon that is in desperate need of academic study.

“In short, a person whose moral compass lets them rob old people will also be a bad business partner,” Nixon said. “This is another fundamental flaw in this ecosystem and why most groups end in betrayal. This structural problem is great for journalists and the police too. Lots of snitching.”

POINTS FOR BRAZENNESS

Asked about the size of Perm’s phishing enterprise, Stotle said there were dozens of distinct phishing groups paying to use Perm’s panel. He said each group was assigned their own subdomain on Perm’s main “command and control server,” which naturally uses the domain name commandandcontrolserver[.]com.

A review of that domain’s history via DomainTools.com shows there are at least 57 separate subdomains scattered across commandandcontrolserver[.]com and two other related control domains — thebackendserver[.]com and lookoutsucks[.]com. That latter domain was created and deployed shortly after Lookout published its blog post on Crypto Chameleon.

The dozens of phishing domains that phone home to these control servers are all kept offline when they are not actively being used in phishing attacks. A social engineering training guide shared by Stotle explains this practice minimizes the chances that a phishing domain will get “redpaged,” a reference to the default red warning pages served by Google Chrome or Firefox whenever someone tries to visit a site that’s been flagged for phishing or distributing malware.

What’s more, while the phishing sites are live their operators typically place a CAPTCHA challenge in front of the main page to prevent security services from scanning and flagging the sites as malicious.

It may seem odd that so many cybercriminal groups operate so openly on instant collaboration networks like Telegram and Discord. After all, this blog is replete with stories about cybercriminals getting caught thanks to personal details they inadvertently leaked or disclosed themselves.

Nixon said the relative openness of these cybercrime communities makes them inherently risky, but it also allows for the rapid formation and recruitment of new potential co-conspirators. Moreover, today’s English-speaking cybercriminals tend to be more afraid of getting home invaded or mugged by fellow cyber thieves than they are of being arrested by authorities.

“The biggest structural threat to the online criminal ecosystem is not the police or researchers, it is fellow criminals,” Nixon said. “To protect them from themselves, every criminal forum and marketplace has a reputation system, even though they know it’s a major liability when the police come. That is why I am not worried as we see criminals migrate to various ‘encrypted’ platforms that promise to ignore the police. To protect themselves better against the law, they have to ditch their protections against fellow criminals and that’s not going to happen.”

U.S. Army Soldier Arrested in AT&T, Verizon Extortions

Federal authorities have arrested and indicted a 20-year-old U.S. Army soldier on suspicion of being Kiberphant0m, a cybercriminal who has been selling and leaking sensitive customer call records stolen earlier this year from AT&T and Verizon. As first reported by KrebsOnSecurity last month, the accused is a communications specialist who was recently stationed in South Korea.

Cameron John Wagenius was arrested near the Army base in Fort Hood, Texas on Dec. 20, after being indicted on two criminal counts of unlawful transfer of confidential phone records.

The sparse, two-page indictment (PDF) doesn’t reference specific victims or hacking activity, nor does it include any personal details about the accused. But a conversation with Wagenius’ mother — Minnesota native Alicia Roen — filled in the gaps.

Roen said that prior to her son’s arrest he’d acknowledged being associated with Connor Riley Moucka, a.k.a. “Judische,” a prolific cybercriminal from Canada who was arrested in late October for stealing data from and extorting dozens of companies that stored data at the cloud service Snowflake.

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Judische said he had no interest in selling the data he’d stolen from Snowflake customers and telecom providers, and that he preferred to outsource that to Kiberphant0m and others. Meanwhile, Kiberphant0m claimed in posts on Telegram that he was responsible for hacking into at least 15 telecommunications firms, including AT&T and Verizon.

On November 26, KrebsOnSecurity published a story that followed a trail of clues left behind by Kiberphantom indicating he was a U.S. Army soldier stationed in South Korea.

Ms. Roen said Cameron worked on radio signals and network communications at an Army base in South Korea for the past two years, returning to the United States periodically. She said Cameron was always good with computers, but that she had no idea he might have been involved in criminal hacking.

“I never was aware he was into hacking,” Roen said. “It was definitely a shock to me when we found this stuff out.”

Ms. Roen said Cameron joined the Army as soon as he was of age, following in his older brother’s footsteps.

“He and his brother when they were like 6 and 7 years old would ask for MREs from other countries,” she recalled, referring to military-issued “meals ready to eat” food rations. “They both always wanted to be in the Army. I’m not sure where things went wrong.”

Immediately after news broke of Moucka’s arrest, Kiberphant0m posted on the hacker community BreachForums what they claimed were the AT&T call logs for President-elect Donald J. Trump and for Vice President Kamala Harris.

“In the event you do not reach out to us @ATNT all presidential government call logs will be leaked,” Kiberphant0m threatened, signing their post with multiple “#FREEWAIFU” tags. “You don’t think we don’t have plans in the event of an arrest? Think again.”

On that same day, Kiberphant0m posted what they claimed was the “data schema” from the U.S. National Security Agency.

On Nov. 5, Kiberphant0m offered call logs stolen from Verizon’s push-to-talk (PTT) customers — mainly U.S. government agencies and emergency first responders. On Nov. 9, Kiberphant0m posted a sales thread on BreachForums offering a “SIM-swapping” service targeting Verizon PTT customers. In a SIM-swap, fraudsters use credentials that are phished or stolen from mobile phone company employees to divert a target’s phone calls and text messages to a device they control.

The profile photo on Wagenius’ Facebook page was deleted within hours of my Nov. 26 story identifying Kiberphant0m as a likely U.S. Army soldier. Still, many of his original profile photos remain, including several that show Wagenius in uniform while holding various Army-issued weapons.

November’s story on Kiberphant0m cited his own Telegram messages saying he maintained a large botnet that was used for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to knock websites, users and networks offline. In 2023, Kiberphant0m sold remote access credentials for a major U.S. defense contractor.

Allison Nixon, chief research officer at the New York-based cybersecurity firm Unit 221B, helped track down Kiberphant0m’s real life identity. Nixon was among several security researchers who faced harassment and specific threats of violence from Judische and his associates.

“Anonymously extorting the President and VP as a member of the military is a bad idea, but it’s an even worse idea to harass people who specialize in de-anonymizing cybercriminals,” Nixon told KrebsOnSecurity. She said the investigation into Kiberphant0m shows that law enforcement is getting better and faster at going after cybercriminals — especially those who are actually living in the United States.

“Between when we, and an anonymous colleague, found his opsec mistake on November 10th to his last Telegram activity on December 6, law enforcement set the speed record for the fastest turnaround time for an American federal cyber case that I have witnessed in my career,” she said.

Nixon asked to share a message for all the other Kiberphant0ms out there who think they can’t be found and arrested.

“I know that young people involved in cybercrime will read these articles,” Nixon said. “You need to stop doing stupid shit and get a lawyer. Law enforcement wants to put all of you in prison for a long time.”

The indictment against Wagenius was filed in Texas, but the case has been transferred to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle.

Web Hacking Service ‘Araneida’ Tied to Turkish IT Firm

Cybercriminals are selling hundreds of thousands of credential sets stolen with the help of a cracked version of Acunetix, a powerful commercial web app vulnerability scanner, new research finds. The cracked software is being resold as a cloud-based attack tool by at least two different services, one of which KrebsOnSecurity traced to an information technology firm based in Turkey.

Cyber threat analysts at Silent Push said they recently received reports from a partner organization that identified an aggressive scanning effort against their website using an Internet address previously associated with a campaign by FIN7, a notorious Russia-based hacking group.

But on closer inspection they discovered the address contained an HTML title of “Araneida Customer Panel,” and found they could search on that text string to find dozens of unique addresses hosting the same service.

It soon became apparent that Araneida was being resold as a cloud-based service using a cracked version of Acunetix, allowing paying customers to conduct offensive reconnaissance on potential target websites, scrape user data, and find vulnerabilities for exploitation.

Silent Push also learned Araneida bundles its service with a robust proxy offering, so that customer scans appear to come from Internet addresses that are randomly selected from a large pool of available traffic relays.

The makers of Acunetix, Texas-based application security vendor Invicti Security, confirmed Silent Push’s findings, saying someone had figured out how to crack the free trial version of the software so that it runs without a valid license key.

“We have been playing cat and mouse for a while with these guys,” said Matt Sciberras, chief information security officer at Invicti.

Silent Push said Araneida is being advertised by an eponymous user on multiple cybercrime forums. The service’s Telegram channel boasts nearly 500 subscribers and explains how to use the tool for malicious purposes.

In a “Fun Facts” list posted to the channel in late September, Araneida said their service was used to take over more than 30,000 websites in just six months, and that one customer used it to buy a Porsche with the payment card data (“dumps”) they sold.

“They are constantly bragging with their community about the crimes that are being committed, how it’s making criminals money,” said Zach Edwards, a senior threat researcher at Silent Push. “They are also selling bulk data and dumps which appear to have been acquired with this tool or due to vulnerabilities found with the tool.”

Silent Push also found a cracked version of Acunetix was powering at least 20 instances of a similar cloud-based vulnerability testing service catering to Mandarin speakers, but they were unable to find any apparently related sales threads about them on the dark web.

Rumors of a cracked version of Acunetix being used by attackers surfaced in June 2023 on Twitter/X, when researchers first posited a connection between observed scanning activity and Araneida.

According to an August 2023 report (PDF) from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Acunetix (presumably a cracked version) is among several tools used by APT 41, a prolific Chinese state-sponsored hacking group.

THE TURKISH CONNECTION

Silent Push notes that the website where Araneida is being sold — araneida[.]co — first came online in February 2023. But a review of this Araneida nickname on the cybercrime forums shows they have been active in the criminal hacking scene since at least 2018.

A search in the threat intelligence platform Intel 471 shows a user by the name Araneida promoted the scanner on two cybercrime forums since 2022, including Breached and Nulled. In 2022, Araneida told fellow Breached members they could be reached on Discord at the username “Ornie#9811.”

According to Intel 471, this same Discord account was advertised in 2019 by a person on the cybercrime forum Cracked who used the monikers “ORN” and “ori0n.” The user “ori0n” mentioned in several posts that they could be reached on Telegram at the username “@sirorny.”

The Sirorny Telegram identity also was referenced as a point of contact for a current user on the cybercrime forum Nulled who is selling website development services, and who references araneida[.]co as one of their projects. That user, “Exorn,” has posts dating back to August 2018.

In early 2020, Exorn promoted a website called “orndorks[.]com,” which they described as a service for automating the scanning for web-based vulnerabilities. A passive DNS lookup on this domain at DomainTools.com shows that its email records pointed to the address ori0nbusiness@protonmail.com.

Constella Intelligence, a company that tracks information exposed in data breaches, finds this email address was used to register an account at Breachforums in July 2024 under the nickname “Ornie.” Constella also finds the same email registered at the website netguard[.]codes in 2021 using the password “ceza2003” [full disclosure: Constella is currently an advertiser on KrebsOnSecurity].

A search on the password ceza2003 in Constella finds roughly a dozen email addresses that used it in an exposed data breach, most of them featuring some variation on the name “altugsara,” including altugsara321@gmail.com. Constella further finds altugsara321@gmail.com was used to create an account at the cybercrime community RaidForums under the username “ori0n,” from an Internet address in Istanbul.

According to DomainTools, altugsara321@gmail.com was used in 2020 to register the domain name altugsara[.]com. Archive.org’s history for that domain shows that in 2021 it featured a website for a then 18-year-old Altuğ Şara from Ankara, Turkey.

LinkedIn finds this same altugsara[.]com domain listed in the “contact info” section of a profile for an Altug Sara from Ankara, who says he has worked the past two years as a senior software developer for a Turkish IT firm called Bilitro Yazilim.

Neither Altug Sara nor Bilitro Yazilim responded to requests for comment.

Invicti’s website states that it has offices in Ankara, but the company’s CEO said none of their employees recognized either name.

“We do have a small team in Ankara, but as far as I know we have no connection to the individual other than the fact that they are also in Ankara,” Invicti CEO Neil Roseman told KrebsOnSecurity.

Researchers at Silent Push say despite Araneida using a seemingly endless supply of proxies to mask the true location of its users, it is a fairly “noisy” scanner that will kick off a large volume of requests to various API endpoints, and make requests to random URLs associated with different content management systems.

What’s more, the cracked version of Acunetix being resold to cybercriminals invokes legacy Acunetix SSL certificates on active control panels, which Silent Push says provides a solid pivot for finding some of this infrastructure, particularly from the Chinese threat actors.

Further reading: Silent Push’s research on Araneida Scanner.

How to Lose a Fortune with Just One Bad Click

Adam Griffin is still in disbelief over how quickly he was robbed of nearly $500,000 in cryptocurrencies. A scammer called using a real Google phone number to warn his Gmail account was being hacked, sent email security alerts directly from google.com, and ultimately seized control over the account by convincing him to click “yes” to a Google prompt on his mobile device.

Griffin is a battalion chief firefighter in the Seattle area, and on May 6 he received a call from someone claiming they were from Google support saying his account was being accessed from Germany. A Google search on the phone number calling him — (650) 203-0000 — revealed it was an official number for Google Assistant, an AI-based service that can engage in two-way conversations.

At the same time, he received an email that came from a google.com email address, warning his Google account was compromised. The message included a “Google Support Case ID number” and information about the Google representative supposedly talking to him on the phone, stating the rep’s name as “Ashton” — the same name given by the caller.

Griffin didn’t learn this until much later, but the email he received had a real google.com address because it was sent via Google Forms, a service available to all Google Docs users that makes it easy to send surveys, quizzes and other communications.

According to tripwire.com’s Graham Cluely, phishers will use Google Forms to create a security alert message, and then change the form’s settings to automatically send a copy of the completed form to any email address entered into the form. The attacker then sends an invitation to complete the form to themselves, not to their intended victim.

“So, the attacker receives the invitation to fill out the form – and when they complete it, they enter their intended victim’s email address into the form, not their own,” Cluely wrote in a December 2023 post. “The attackers are taking advantage of the fact that the emails are being sent out directly by Google Forms (from the google.com domain). It’s an established legitimate domain that helps to make the email look more legitimate and is less likely to be intercepted en route by email-filtering solutions.”

The fake Google representative was polite, patient, professional and reassuring. Ashton told Griffin he was going to receive a notification that would allow him to regain control of the account from the hackers. Sure enough, a Google prompt instantly appeared on his phone asking, “Is it you trying to recover your account?”

Griffin said that after receiving the pop-up prompt from Google on his phone, he felt more at ease that he really was talking to someone at Google. In reality, the thieves caused the alert to appear on his phone merely by stepping through Google’s account recovery process for Griffin’s Gmail address.

“As soon as I clicked yes, I gave them access to my Gmail, which was synched to Google Photos,” Griffin said.

Unfortunately for Griffin, years ago he used Google Photos to store an image of the secret seed phrase that was protecting his cryptocurrency wallet. Armed with that phrase, the phishers could drain all of his funds.

“From there they were able to transfer approximately $450,000 out of my Exodus wallet,” Griffin recalled.

Griffin said just minutes after giving away access to his Gmail account he received a call from someone claiming to be with Coinbase, who likewise told him someone in Germany was trying to take over his account.

Griffin said a follow-up investigation revealed the attackers had used his Gmail account to gain access to his Coinbase account from a VPN connection in California, providing the multi-factor code from his Google Authenticator app. Unbeknownst to him at the time, Google Authenticator by default also makes the same codes available in one’s Google account online.

But when the thieves tried to move $100,000 worth of cryptocurrency out of his account, Coinbase sent an email stating that the account had been locked, and that he would have to submit additional verification documents before he could do anything with it.

GRAND THEFT AUTOMATED

Just days after Griffin was robbed, a scammer impersonating Google managed to phish 45 bitcoins — approximately $4,725,000 at today’s value — from Tony, a 42-year-old professional from northern California. Tony agreed to speak about his harrowing experience on condition that his last name not be used.

Tony got into bitcoin back in 2013 and has been investing in it ever since. On the evening of May 15, 2024, Tony was putting his three- and one-year-old boys to bed when he received a message from Google about an account security issue, followed by a phone call from a “Daniel Alexander” at Google who said his account was compromised by hackers.

Tony said he had just signed up for Google’s Gemini AI (an artificial intelligence platform formerly known as “Bard”), and mistakenly believed the call was part of that service. Daniel told Tony his account was being accessed by someone in Frankfurt, Germany, and that he could evict the hacker and recover access to the account by clicking “yes” to the prompt that Google was going to send to his phone.

The Google prompt arrived seconds later. And to his everlasting regret, Tony clicked the “Yes, it’s me” button.

Then came another call, this one allegedly from security personnel at Trezor, a company that makes encrypted hardware devices made to store cryptocurrency seed phrases securely offline. The caller said someone had submitted a request to Trezor to close his account, and they forwarded Tony a message sent from his Gmail account that included his name, Social Security number, date of birth, address, phone number and email address.

Tony said he began to believe then that his Trezor account truly was compromised. The caller convinced him to “recover” his account by entering his cryptocurrency seed phrase at a phishing website (verify-trezor[.]io) that mimicked the official Trezor website.

“At this point I go into fight or flight mode,” Tony recalled. “I’ve got my kids crying, my wife is like what the heck is going on? My brain went haywire. I put my seed phrase into a phishing site, and that was it.”

Almost immediately, all of the funds he was planning to save for retirement and for his children’s college fund were drained from his account.

“I made mistakes due to being so busy and not thinking correctly,” Tony told KrebsOnSecurity. “I had gotten so far away from the security protocols in bitcoin as life had changed so much since having kids.”

Tony said the theft left him traumatized and angry for months.

“All I was thinking about was protecting my boys and it ended up costing me everything,” he said. “Needless to say I’m devastated and have had to do serious therapy to get through it.”

MISERY LOVES COMPANY

Tony told KrebsOnSecurity that in the weeks following the theft of his 45 bitcoins, he became so consumed with rage and shame that he was seriously contemplating suicide. Then one day, while scouring the Internet for signs that others may have been phished by Daniel, he encountered Griffin posting on Reddit about the phone number involved in his recent bitcoin theft.

Griffin said the two of them were initially suspicious of each other — exchanging cautious messages for about a week — but he decided Tony was telling the truth after contacting the FBI agent that Tony said was working his case. Comparing notes, they discovered the fake Google security alerts they received just prior to their individual bitcoin thefts referenced the same phony “Google Support Case ID” number.

More importantly, Tony recognized the voice of “Daniel from Google” when it was featured in an interview by Junseth, a podcaster who covers cryptocurrency scams. The same voice that had coaxed Tony out of his considerable cryptocurrency holdings just days earlier also had tried to phish Junseth, who played along for several minutes before revealing he knew it was a scam.

Daniel told Junseth he was a teenager and worked with other scam callers who had all met years ago on the game Minecraft, and that he recently enjoyed a run of back-to-back Gmail account compromises that led to crypto theft paydays.

“No one gets arrested,” Daniel enthused to Junseth in the May 7 podcast, which quickly went viral on social media. “It’s almost like there’s no consequences. I have small legal side hustles, like businesses and shit that I can funnel everything through. If you were to see me in real life, I look like a regular child going to school with my backpack and shit, you’d never expect this kid is stealing all this shit.”

Daniel explained that they often use an automated bot that initiates calls to targets warning that their account is experiencing suspicious activity, and that they should press “1” to speak with a representative. This process, he explained, essentially self-selects people who are more likely to be susceptible to their social engineering schemes. [It is possible — but not certain — that this bot Daniel referenced explains the incoming call to Griffin from Google Assistant that precipitated his bitcoin heist].

Daniel told Junseth he and his co-conspirators had just scored a $1.2 million theft that was still pending on the bitcoin investment platform SwanBitcoin. In response, Junseth tagged SwanBitcoin in a post about his podcast on Twitter/X, and the CEO of Swan quickly replied that they caught the $1.2 million transaction that morning.

Apparently, Daniel didn’t appreciate having his voice broadcast to the world (or his $1.2 million bitcoin heist disrupted) because according to Junseth someone submitted a baseless copyright infringement claim about it to Soundcloud, which was hosting the recording.

The complaint alleged the recording included a copyrighted song, but that wasn’t true: Junseth later posted a raw version of the recording to Telegram, and it clearly had no music in the background. Nevertheless, Soundcloud removed the audio file.

“All these companies are very afraid of copyright,” Junseth explained in a May 2024 interview with the podcast whatbitcoindid.com, which features some of the highlights from his recorded call with Daniel.

“It’s interesting because copyright infringement really is an act that you’re claiming against the publisher, but for some reason these companies have taken a very hard line against it, so if you even claim there’s copyrighted material in it they just take it down and then they leave it to you to prove that you’re innocent,” Junseth said. “In Soundcloud’s instance, part of declaring your innocence is you have to give them your home address and everything else, and it says right on there, ‘this will be provided to the person making the copyright claim.'”

AFTERMATH

When Junseth asked how potential victims could protect themselves, Daniel explained that if the target doesn’t have their Google Authenticator synced to their Google cloud account, the scammers can’t easily pivot into the victim’s accounts at cryptocurrency exchanges, as they did with Griffin.

By default, Google Authenticator syncs all one-time codes with a Gmail user’s account, meaning if someone gains access to your Google account, they can then access all of the one-time codes handed out by your Google Authenticator app.

To change this setting, open Authenticator on your mobile device, select your profile picture, and then choose “Use without an Account” from the menu. If you disable this, it’s a good idea to keep a printed copy of one-time backup codes, and to store those in a secure place.

You may also wish to download Google Authenticator to another mobile device that you control. Otherwise, if you turn off cloud synching and lose that sole mobile device with your Google Authenticator app, it could be difficult or impossible to recover access to your account if you somehow get locked out.

Griffin told KrebsOnSecurity he had no idea it was so easy for thieves to take over his account, and to abuse so many different Google services in the process.

“I know I definitely made mistakes, but I also know Google could do a lot better job protecting people,” he said.

In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, Google said it can confirm that this was a narrow phishing campaign, reaching a “very small group of people.”

“We’re aware of this narrow and targeted attack, and have hardened our defenses to block recovery attempts from this actor,” the company said in a written statement, which emphasized that the real Google will never call you.

“While these types of social engineering campaigns are constantly evolving, we are continuously working to harden our systems with new tools and technical innovations, as well as sharing updated guidance with our users to stay ahead of attackers,” the statement reads.

Both Griffin and Tony say they continue to receive “account security” calls from people pretending to work for Google or one of the cryptocurrency platforms.

“It’s like you get put on some kind of list, and then those lists get recycled over and over,” Tony said.

Griffin said that for several months after his ordeal, he accepted almost every cryptocurrency scam call that came his way, playing along in the vain hope of somehow tricking the caller into revealing details about who they are in real life. But he stopped after his taunting caused one of the scammers to start threatening him personally.

“I probably shouldn’t have, but I recorded two 30-minute conversations with these guys,” Griffin said, acknowledging that maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to antagonize cybercriminals who clearly already knew everything about him. “One guy I talked to about his personal life, and then his friend called me up and said he was going to dox me and do all this other bad stuff. My FBI contact later told me not to talk to these guys anymore.”

Sound advice. So is hanging up whenever anyone calls you about a security problem with one of your accounts. Even security-conscious people tend to underestimate the complex and shifting threat from phone-based phishing scams, but they do so at their peril.

When in doubt: Hang up, look up, and call back. If your response to these types of calls involves anything other than hanging up, researching the correct phone number, and contacting the entity that claims to be calling, you may be setting yourself up for a costly and humbling learning experience.

Understand that your email credentials are more than likely the key to unlocking your entire digital identity. Be sure to use a long, unique passphrase for your email address, and never pick a passphrase that you have ever used anywhere else (not even a variation on an old password).

Finally, it’s also a good idea to take advantage of the strongest multi-factor authentication methods offered. For Gmail/Google accounts, that includes the use of passkeys or physical security keys, which are heavily phishing resistant. For Google users holding measurable sums of cryptocurrency, the most secure option is Google’s free Advanced Protection program, which includes more extensive account security features but also comes with some serious convenience trade-offs.

How Cryptocurrency Turns to Cash in Russian Banks

A financial firm registered in Canada has emerged as the payment processor for dozens of Russian cryptocurrency exchanges and websites hawking cybercrime services aimed at Russian-speaking customers, new research finds. Meanwhile, an investigation into the Vancouver street address used by this company shows it is home to dozens of foreign currency dealers, money transfer businesses, and cryptocurrency exchanges — none of which are physically located there.

Richard Sanders is a blockchain analyst and investigator who advises the law enforcement and intelligence community. Sanders spent most of 2023 in Ukraine, traveling with Ukrainian soldiers while mapping the shifting landscape of Russian crypto exchanges that are laundering money for narcotics networks operating in the region.

More recently, Sanders has focused on identifying how dozens of popular cybercrime services are getting paid by their customers, and how they are converting cryptocurrency revenues into cash. For the past several months, he’s been signing up for various cybercrime services, and then tracking where their customer funds go from there.

The 122 services targeted in Sanders’ research include some of the more prominent businesses advertising on the cybercrime forums today, such as:

-abuse-friendly or “bulletproof” hosting providers like anonvm[.]wtf, and PQHosting;
-sites selling aged email, financial, or social media accounts, such as verif[.]work and kopeechka[.]store;
-anonymity or “proxy” providers like crazyrdp[.]com and rdp[.]monster;
-anonymous SMS services, including anonsim[.]net and smsboss[.]pro.

Sanders said he first encountered some of these services while investigating Kremlin-funded disinformation efforts in Ukraine, as they are all useful in assembling large-scale, anonymous social media campaigns.

According to Sanders, all 122 of the services he tested are processing transactions through a company called Cryptomus, which says it is a cryptocurrency payments platform based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Cryptomus’ website says its parent firm — Xeltox Enterprises Ltd. (formerly certa-pay[.]com) — is registered as a money service business (MSB) with the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC).

Sanders said the payment data he gathered also shows that at least 56 cryptocurrency exchanges are currently using Cryptomus to process transactions, including financial entities with names like casher[.]su, grumbot[.]com, flymoney[.]biz, obama[.]ru and swop[.]is.

These platforms are built for Russian speakers, and they each advertise the ability to anonymously swap one form of cryptocurrency for another. They also allow the exchange of cryptocurrency for cash in accounts at some of Russia’s largest banks — nearly all of which are currently sanctioned by the United States and other western nations.

An analysis of their technology infrastructure shows that all of these exchanges use Russian email providers, and most are directly hosted in Russia or by Russia-backed ISPs with infrastructure in Europe (e.g. Selectel, Netwarm UK, Beget, Timeweb and DDoS-Guard). The analysis also showed nearly all 56 exchanges used services from Cloudflare, a global content delivery network based in San Francisco.

“Purportedly, the purpose of these platforms is for companies to accept cryptocurrency payments in exchange for goods or services,” Sanders told KrebsOnSecurity. “Unfortunately, it is next to impossible to find any goods for sale with websites using Cryptomus, and the services appear to fall into one or two different categories: Facilitating transactions with sanctioned Russian banks, and platforms providing the infrastructure and means for cyber attacks.”

Cryptomus did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

PHANTOM ADDRESSES?

The Cryptomus website and its FINTRAC listing say the company’s registered address is Suite 170, 422 Richards St. in Vancouver, BC. This address was the subject of an investigation published in July by CTV National News and the Investigative Journalism Foundation (IJF), which documented dozens of cases across Canada where multiple MSBs are incorporated at the same address, often without the knowledge or consent of the location’s actual occupant.

Their inquiry found 422 Richards St. was listed as the registered address for at least 76 foreign currency dealers, eight MSBs, and six cryptocurrency exchanges. At that address is a three-story building that used to be a bank and now houses a massage therapy clinic and a co-working space. But they found none of the MSBs or currency dealers were paying for services at that co-working space.

The reporters found another collection of 97 MSBs clustered at an address for a commercial office suite in Ontario, even though there was no evidence these companies had ever arranged for any business services at that address.

Peter German, a former deputy commissioner for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who authored two reports on money laundering in British Columbia, told the publications it goes against the spirit of Canada’s registration requirements for such businesses, which are considered high-risk for money laundering and terrorist financing.

“If you’re able to have 70 in one building, that’s just an abuse of the whole system,” German said.

Ten MSBs registered to 422 Richard St. had their registrations revoked. One company at 422 Richards St. whose registration was revoked this year had a director with a listed address in Russia, the publications reported. “Others appear to be directed by people who are also directors of companies in Cyprus and other high-risk jurisdictions for money laundering,” they wrote.

A review of FINTRAC’s registry (.CSV) shows many of the MSBs at 422 Richards St. are international money transfer or remittance services to countries like Malaysia, India and Nigeria. Some act as currency exchanges, while others appear to sell merchant accounts and online payment services. Still, KrebsOnSecurity could find no obvious connections between the 56 Russian cryptocurrency exchanges identified by Sanders and the dozens of payment companies that FINTRAC says share an address with the Cryptomus parent firm Xeltox Enterprises.

SANCTIONS EVASION

In August 2023, Binance and some of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges responded to sanctions against Russia by cutting off many Russian banks and restricting Russian customers to transactions in Rubles only. Sanders said prior to that change, most of the exchanges currently served by Cryptomus were handling customer funds with their own self-custodial cryptocurrency wallets.

By September 2023, Sanders said he found the exchanges he was tracking had all nested themselves like Matryoshka dolls at Cryptomus, which adds a layer of obfuscation to all transactions by generating a new cryptocurrency wallet for each order.

“They all simply moved to Cryptomus,” he said. “Cryptomus generates new wallets for each order, rendering ongoing attribution to require transactions with high fees each time.”

“Exchanges like Binance and OKX removing Sberbank and other sanctioned banks and offboarding Russian users did not remove the ability of Russians to transact in and out of cryptocurrency easily,” he continued. “In fact, it’s become easier, because the instant-swap exchanges do not even have Know Your Customer rules. The U.S. sanctions resulted in the majority of Russian instant exchanges switching from their self-custodial wallets to platforms, especially Cryptomus.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin in August signed a new law legalizing cryptocurrency mining and allowing the use of cryptocurrency for international payments. The Russian government’s embrace of cryptocurrency was a remarkable pivot: Bloomberg notes that as recently as January 2022, just weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the central bank proposed a blanket ban on the use and creation of cryptocurrencies.

In a report on Russia’s cryptocurrency ambitions published in September, blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis said Russia’s move to integrate crypto into its financial system may improve its ability to bypass the U.S.-led financial system and to engage in non-dollar denominated trade.

“Although it can be hard to quantify the true impact of certain sanctions actions, the fact that Russian officials have singled out the effect of sanctions on Moscow’s ability to process cross-border trade suggests that the impact felt is great enough to incite urgency to legitimize and invest in alternative payment channels it once decried,” Chainalysis assessed.

Asked about its view of activity on Cryptomus, Chainanlysis said Cryptomus has been used by criminals of all stripes for laundering money and/or the purchase of goods and services.

“We see threat actors engaged in ransomware, narcotics, darknet markets, fraud, cybercrime, sanctioned entities and jurisdictions, and hacktivism making deposits to Cryptomus for purchases but also laundering the services using Cryptomos payment API,” the company said in a statement.

SHELL GAMES

It is unclear if Cryptomus and/or Xeltox Enterprises have any presence in Canada at all. A search in the United Kingdom’s Companies House registry for Xeltox’s former name — Certa Payments Ltd. — shows an entity by that name incorporated at a mail drop in London in December 2023.

The sole shareholder and director of that company is listed as a 25-year-old Ukrainian woman in the Czech Republic named Vira Krychka. Ms. Krychka was recently appointed the director of several other new U.K. firms, including an entity created in February 2024 called Globopay UAB Ltd, and another called WS Management and Advisory Corporation Ltd. Ms. Krychka did not respond to a request for comment.

WS Management and Advisory Corporation bills itself as the regulatory body that exclusively oversees licenses of cryptocurrencies in the jurisdiction of Western Sahara, a disputed territory in northwest Africa. Its website says the company assists applicants with bank setup and formation, online gaming licenses, and the creation and licensing of foreign exchange brokers. One of Certa Payments’ former websites — certa[.]website — also shared a server with 12 other domains, including rasd-state[.]ws, a website for the Central Reserve Authority of the Western Sahara.

This business registry from the Czech Republic indicates Ms. Krychka works as a director at an advertising and marketing firm called Icon Tech SRO, which was previously named Blaven Technologies (Blaven’s website says it is an online payment service provider).

In August 2024, Icon Tech changed its name again to Mezhundarondnaya IBU SRO, which describes itself as an “experienced company in IT consulting” that is based in Armenia. The same registry says Ms. Krychka is somehow also a director at a Turkish investment venture. So much business acumen at such a young age!

For now, Canada remains an attractive location for cryptocurrency businesses to set up shop, at least on paper. The IJF and CTV News found that as of February 2024, there were just over 3,000 actively registered MSBs in Canada, 1,247 of which were located at the same building as at least one other MSB.

“That analysis does not include the roughly 2,700 MSBs whose registrations have lapsed, been revoked or otherwise stopped,” they observed. “If they are included, then a staggering 2,061 out of 5,705 total MSBs share a building with at least one other MSB.”

Why Phishers Love New TLDs Like .shop, .top and .xyz

Phishing attacks increased nearly 40 percent in the year ending August 2024, with much of that growth concentrated at a small number of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) — such as .shop, .top, .xyz — that attract scammers with rock-bottom prices and no meaningful registration requirements, new research finds. Meanwhile, the nonprofit entity that oversees the domain name industry is moving forward with plans to introduce a slew of new gTLDs.

A study on phishing data released by Interisle Consulting finds that new gTLDs introduced in the last few years command just 11 percent of the market for new domains, but accounted for roughly 37 percent of cybercrime domains reported between September 2023 and August 2024.

Interisle was sponsored by several anti-spam organizations, including the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE), and the Messaging, Malware, and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG).

The study finds that while .com and .net domains made up approximately half of all domains registered in the past year (more than all of the other TLDs combined) they accounted for just over 40 percent of all cybercrime domains. Interisle says an almost equal share — 37 percent — of cybercrime domains were registered through new gTLDs.

Spammers and scammers gravitate toward domains in the new gTLDs because these registrars tend to offer cheap or free registration with little to no account or identity verification requirements. For example, among the gTLDs with the highest cybercrime domain scores in this year’s study, nine offered registration fees for less than $1, and nearly two dozen offered fees of less than $2.00. By comparison, the cheapest price identified for a .com domain was $5.91.

Currently, there are around 2,500 registrars authorized to sell domains by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the California nonprofit that oversees the domain industry.

Incredibly, despite years of these reports showing phishers heavily abusing new gTLDs, ICANN is shuffling forward on a plan to introduce even more of them. ICANN’s proposed next round envisions accepting applications for new gTLDs in 2026.

John Levine is author of the book “The Internet for Dummies” and president of CAUCE. Levine said adding more TLDs without a much stricter registration policy will likely further expand an already plentiful greenfield for cybercriminals.

“The problem is that ICANN can’t make up their mind whether they are the neutral nonprofit regulator or just the domain speculator trade association,” Levine told KrebsOnSecurity. “But they act a lot more like the latter.”

Levine said the vast majority of new gTLDs have a few thousand domains — a far cry from the number of registrations they would need just to cover the up-front costs of operating a new gTLD (~$180,000-$300,000). New gTLD registrars can quickly attract customers by selling domains cheaply to customers who buy domains in bulk, but that tends to be a losing strategy.

“Selling to criminals and spammers turns out to be lousy business,” Levine said. “You can charge whatever you want on the first year, but you have to charge list price on domain renewals. And criminals and spammers never renew. So if it sounds like the economics makes no sense it’s because the economics makes no sense.”

In virtually all previous spam reports, Interisle found the top brands referenced in phishing attacks were the largest technology companies, including Apple, Facebook, Google and PayPal. But this past year, Interisle found the U.S. Postal Service was by far the most-phished entity, with more than four times the number of phishing domains as the second most-frequent target (Apple).

At least some of that increase is likely from a prolific cybercriminal using the nickname Chenlun, who has been selling phishing kits targeting domestic postal services in the United States and at least a dozen other countries.

Interisle says an increasing number of phishers are eschewing domain registrations altogether, and instead taking advantage of subdomain providers like blogspot.com, pages.dev, and weebly.com. The report notes that cyberattacks hosted at subdomain provider services can be tough to mitigate, because only the subdomain provider can disable malicious accounts or take down malicious web pages.

“Any action upstream, such as blocking the second-level domain, would have an impact across the provider’s whole customer base,” the report observes.

Interisle tracked more than 1.18 million instances of subdomains used for phishing in the past year (a 114 percent increase), and found more than half of those were subdomains at blogspot.com and other services operated by Google.

“Many of these services allow the creation of large numbers of accounts at one time, which is highly exploited by criminals,” the report concludes. “Subdomain providers should limit the number of subdomains (user accounts) a customer can create at one time and suspend automated, high-volume automated account sign-ups – especially using free services.”

Dec. 4, 10:21 a.m. ET: Corrected link to report.

Hacker in Snowflake Extortions May Be a U.S. Soldier

Two men have been arrested for allegedly stealing data from and extorting dozens of companies that used the cloud data storage company Snowflake, but a third suspect — a prolific hacker known as Kiberphant0m — remains at large and continues to publicly extort victims. However, this person’s identity may not remain a secret for long: A careful review of Kiberphant0m’s daily chats across multiple cybercrime personas suggests they are a U.S. Army soldier who is or was recently stationed in South Korea.

Kiberphant0m’s identities on cybercrime forums and on Telegram and Discord chat channels have been selling data stolen from customers of the cloud data storage company Snowflake. At the end of 2023, malicious hackers discovered that many companies had uploaded huge volumes of sensitive customer data to Snowflake accounts that were protected with nothing more than a username and password (no multi-factor authentication required).

After scouring darknet markets for stolen Snowflake account credentials, the hackers began raiding the data storage repositories for some of the world’s largest corporations. Among those was AT&T, which disclosed in July that cybercriminals had stolen personal information, phone and text message records for roughly 110 million people.  Wired.com reported in July that AT&T paid a hacker $370,000 to delete stolen phone records.

On October 30, Canadian authorities arrested Alexander Moucka, a.k.a. Connor Riley Moucka of Kitchener, Ontario, on a provisional arrest warrant from the United States, which has since indicted him on 20 criminal counts connected to the Snowflake breaches. Another suspect in the Snowflake hacks, John Erin Binns, is an American who is currently incarcerated in Turkey.

Investigators say Moucka, who went by the handles Judische and Waifu, had tasked Kiberphant0m with selling data stolen from Snowflake customers who refused to pay a ransom to have their information deleted. Immediately after news broke of Moucka’s arrest, Kiberphant0m was clearly furious, and posted on the hacker community BreachForums what they claimed were the AT&T call logs for President-elect Donald J. Trump and for Vice President Kamala Harris.

“In the event you do not reach out to us @ATNT all presidential government call logs will be leaked,” Kiberphant0m threatened, signing their post with multiple “#FREEWAIFU” tags. “You don’t think we don’t have plans in the event of an arrest? Think again.”

On the same day, Kiberphant0m posted what they claimed was the “data schema” from the U.S. National Security Agency.

“This was obtained from the ATNT Snowflake hack which is why ATNT paid an extortion,” Kiberphant0m wrote in a thread on BreachForums. “Why would ATNT pay Waifu for the data when they wouldn’t even pay an extortion for over 20M+ SSNs?”

Also on Nov. 5, Kiberphant0m offered call logs stolen from Verizon’s push-to-talk (PTT) customers — mainly U.S. government agencies and emergency first responders. On Nov. 9, Kiberphant0m posted a sales thread on BreachForums offering a “SIM-swapping” service targeting Verizon PTT customers. In a SIM-swap, fraudsters use credentials that are phished or stolen from mobile phone company employees to divert a target’s phone calls and text messages to a device they control.

MEET ‘BUTTHOLIO’

Kiberphant0m joined BreachForums in January 2024, but their public utterances on Discord and Telegram channels date back to at least early 2022. On their first post to BreachForums, Kiberphant0m said they could be reached at the Telegram handle @cyb3rph4nt0m.

A review of @cyb3rph4nt0m shows this user has posted more than 4,200 messages since January 2024. Many of these messages were attempts to recruit people who could be hired to deploy a piece of malware that enslaved host machines in an Internet of Things (IoT) botnet.

On BreachForums, Kiberphant0m has sold the source code to “Shi-Bot,” a custom Linux DDoS botnet based on the Mirai malware. Kiberphant0m had few sales threads on BreachForums prior to the Snowflake attacks becoming public in May, and many of those involved databases stolen from companies in South Korea.

On June 5, 2024, a Telegram user by the name “Buttholio” joined the fraud-focused Telegram channel “Comgirl” and claimed to be Kiberphant0m. Buttholio made the claim after being taunted as a nobody by another denizen of Comgirl, referring to their @cyb3rph4nt0m account on Telegram and the Kiberphant0m user on cybercrime forums.

“Type ‘kiberphant0m’ on google with the quotes,” Buttholio told another user. “I’ll wait. Go ahead. Over 50 articles. 15+ telecoms breached. I got the IMSI number to every single person that’s ever registered in Verizon, Tmobile, ATNT and Verifone.”

On Sept. 17, 2023, Buttholio posted in a Discord chat room dedicated to players of the video game Escape from Tarkov. “Come to Korea, servers there is pretty much no extract camper or cheater,” Buttholio advised.

In another message that same day in the gaming Discord, Buttholio told others they bought the game in the United States, but that they were playing it in Asia.

“USA is where the game was purchased from, server location is actual in game servers u play on. I am a u.s. soldier so i bought it in the states but got on rotation so i have to use asian servers,” they shared.

‘REVERSESHELL’

The account @Kiberphant0m was assigned the Telegram ID number 6953392511. A review of this ID at the cyber intelligence platform Flashpoint shows that on January 4, 2024 Kibertphant0m posted to the Telegram channel “Dstat,” which is populated by cybercriminals involved in launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and selling DDoS-for-hire services [Full disclosure: Flashpoint is currently an advertiser on this website].

Immediately after Kiberphant0m logged on to the Dstat channel, another user wrote “hi buttholio,” to which Kiberphant0m replied with an affirmative greeting “wsg,” or “what’s good.” On Nov. 1, Dstat’s website dstat[.]cc was seized as part of “Operation PowerOFF,” an international law enforcement action against DDoS services.

Flashpoint’s data shows that @kiberphant0m told a fellow member of Dstat on April 10, 2024 that their alternate Telegram username was “@reverseshell,” and did the same two weeks later in the Telegram chat The Jacuzzi. The Telegram ID for this account is 5408575119.

Way back on Nov. 15, 2022, @reverseshell told a fellow member of a Telegram channel called Cecilio Chat that they were a soldier in the U.S. Army. This user also shared the following image of someone pictured waist-down in military fatigues, with a camouflaged backpack at their feet:

In September 2022, Reverseshell was embroiled in an argument with another member who had threatened to launch a DDoS attack against Reverseshell’s Internet address. After the promised attack materialized, Reverseshell responded, “Yall just hit military base contracted wifi.”

In a chat from October 2022, Reverseshell was bragging about the speed of the servers they were using, and in reply to another member’s question said that they were accessing the Internet via South Korea Telecom.

Telegram chat logs archived by Flashpoint show that on Aug. 23, 2022, Reverseshell bragged they’d been using automated tools to find valid logins for Internet servers that they resold to others.

“I’ve hit US gov servers with default creds,” Reverseshell wrote, referring to systems with easy-to-guess usernames and/or passwords. “Telecom control servers, machinery shops, Russian ISP servers, etc. I sold a few big companies for like $2-3k a piece. You can sell the access when you get a big SSH into corporation.”

On July 29, 2023, Reverseshell posted a screenshot of a login page for a major U.S. defense contractor, claiming they had an aerospace company’s credentials to sell.

PROMAN AND VARS_SECC

Flashpoint finds the Telegram ID 5408575119 has used several aliases since 2022, including Reverseshell and Proman557.

A search on the username Proman557 at the cyber intelligence platform Intel 471 shows that a hacker by the name “Proman554” registered on Hackforums in September 2022, and in messages to other users Proman554 said they can be reached at the Telegram account Buttholio.

Intel 471 also finds the Proman557 moniker is one of many used by a person on the Russian-language hacking forum Exploit in 2022 who sold a variety of Linux-based botnet malware.

Proman557 was eventually banned — allegedly for scamming a fellow member out of $350 — and the Exploit moderator warned forum users that Proman557 had previously registered under several other nicknames, including an account called “Vars_Secc.”

Vars_Secc’s thousands of comments on Telegram over two years show this user divided their time between online gaming, maintaining a DDoS botnet, and promoting the sale or renting of their botnets to other users.

“I use ddos for many things not just to be a skid,” Vars_Secc pronounced. “Why do you think I haven’t sold my net?” They then proceeded to list the most useful qualities of their botnet:

-I use it to hit off servers that ban me or piss me off
-I used to ddos certain games to get my items back since the data reverts to when u joined
-I use it for server side desync RCE vulnerabilities
-I use it to sometimes ransom
-I use it when bored as a source of entertainment

Flashpoint shows that in June 2023, Vars_Secc responded to taunting from a fellow member in the Telegram channel SecHub who had threatened to reveal their personal details to the federal government for a reward.

“Man I’ve been doing this shit for 4 years,” Vars_Secc replied nonchalantly. “I highly doubt the government is going to pay millions of dollars for data on some random dude operating a pointless ddos botnet and finding a few vulnerabilities here and there.”

For several months in 2023, Vars_Secc also was an active member of the Russian-language crime forum XSS, where they sold access to a U.S. government server for $2,000. However, Vars_Secc would be banned from XSS after attempting to sell access to the Russian telecommunications giant Rostelecom. [In this, Vars_Secc violated the Number One Rule for operating on a Russia-based crime forum: Never offer to hack or sell data stolen from Russian entities or citizens].

On June 20, 2023, Vars_Secc posted a sales thread on the cybercrime forum Ramp 2.0 titled, “Selling US Gov Financial Access.”

“Server within the network, possible to pivot,” Vars_Secc’s sparse sales post read. “Has 3-5 subroutes connected to it. Price $1,250. Telegram: Vars_Secc.”

Vars_Secc also used Ramp in June 2023 to sell access to a “Vietnam government Internet Network Information Center.”

“Selling access server allocated within the network,” Vars_Secc wrote. “Has some data on it. $500.”

BUG BOUNTIES

The Vars_Secc identity claimed on Telegram in May 2023 that they made money by submitting reports about software flaws to HackerOne, a company that helps technology firms field reports about security vulnerabilities in their products and services. Specifically, Vars_Secc said they had earned financial rewards or “bug bounties” from reddit.com, the U.S. Department of Defense, and Coinbase, among 30 others.

“I make money off bug bounties, it’s quite simple,” Vars_Secc said when asked what they do for a living. “That’s why I have over 30 bug bounty reports on HackerOne.”

A month before that, Vars_Secc said they’d found a vulnerability in reddit.com.

“I poisoned Reddit’s cache,” they explained. “I’m going to exploit it further, then report it to reddit.”

KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from HackerOne, which said it would investigate the claims. This story will be updated if they respond.

The Vars_Secc telegram handle also has claimed ownership of the BreachForums member “Boxfan,” and Intel 471 shows Boxfan’s early posts on the forum had the Vars_Secc Telegram account in their signature. In their most recent post to BreachForums in January 2024, Boxfan disclosed a security vulnerability they found in Naver, the most popular search engine in South Korea (according to statista.com). Boxfan’s comments suggest they have strong negative feelings about South Korean culture.

“Have fun exploiting this vulnerability,” Boxfan wrote on BreachForums, after pasting a long string of computer code intended to demonstrate the flaw. “Fuck you South Korea and your discriminatory views. Nobody likes ur shit kpop you evil fucks. Whoever can dump this DB [database] congrats. I don’t feel like doing it so I’ll post it to the forum.”

The many identities tied to Kiberphant0m strongly suggest they are or until recently were a U.S. Army soldier stationed in South Korea. Kiberphant0m’s alter egos never mentioned their military rank, regiment, or specialization.

However, it is likely that Kiberphant0m’s facility with computers and networking was noticed by the Army. According to the U.S. Army’s website, the bulk of its forces in South Korea reside within the Eighth Army, which has a dedicated cyber operations unit focused on defending against cyber threats.

On April 1, 2023, Vars_Secc posted to a public Telegram chat channel a screenshot of the National Security Agency’s website. The image indicated the visitor had just applied for some type of job at the NSA.

The NSA has not yet responded to requests for comment.

Reached via Telegram, Kiberphant0m acknowledged that KrebsOnSecurity managed to unearth their old handles.

“I see you found the IP behind it no way,” Kiberphant0m replied. “I see you managed to find my old aliases LOL.”

Kiberphant0m denied being in the U.S. Army or ever being in South Korea, and said all of that was a lengthy ruse designed to create a fictitious persona. “Epic opsec troll,” they claimed.

Asked if they were at all concerned about getting busted, Kiberphant0m called that an impossibility.

“I literally can’t get caught,” Kiberphant0m said, declining an invitation to explain why. “I don’t even live in the USA Mr. Krebs.”

Below is a mind map that hopefully helps illustrate some of the connections between and among Kiberphant0m’s apparent alter egos.

KrebsOnSecurity would like to extend a special note of thanks to the New York City based security intelligence firm Unit 221B for their assistance in helping to piece together key elements of Kiberphant0m’s different identities.

Feds Charge Five Men in ‘Scattered Spider’ Roundup

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles this week unsealed criminal charges against five men alleged to be members of a hacking group responsible for dozens of cyber intrusions at major U.S. technology companies between 2021 and 2023, including LastPass, MailChimp, Okta, T-Mobile and Twilio.

The five men, aged 20 to 25, are allegedly members of a hacking conspiracy dubbed “Scattered Spider” and “Oktapus,” which specialized in SMS-based phishing attacks that tricked employees at tech firms into entering their credentials and one-time passcodes at phishing websites.

The targeted SMS scams asked employees to click a link and log in at a website that mimicked their employer’s Okta authentication page. Some SMS phishing messages told employees their VPN credentials were expiring and needed to be changed; other phishing messages advised employees about changes to their upcoming work schedule.

These attacks leveraged newly-registered domains that often included the name of the targeted company, such as twilio-help[.]com and ouryahoo-okta[.]com. The phishing websites were normally kept online for just one or two hours at a time, meaning they were often yanked offline before they could be flagged by anti-phishing and security services.

The phishing kits used for these campaigns featured a hidden Telegram instant message bot that forwarded any submitted credentials in real-time. The bot allowed the attackers to use the phished username, password and one-time code to log in as that employee at the real employer website.

In August 2022, multiple security firms gained access to the server that was receiving data from that Telegram bot, which on several occasions leaked the Telegram ID and handle of its developer, who used the nickname “Joeleoli.”

That Joeleoli moniker registered on the cybercrime forum OGusers in 2018 with the email address joelebruh@gmail.com, which also was used to register accounts at several websites for a Joel Evans from North Carolina. Indeed, prosecutors say Joeleoli’s real name is Joel Martin Evans, and he is a 25-year-old from Jacksonville, North Carolina.

One of Scattered Spider’s first big victims in its 2022 SMS phishing spree was Twilio, a company that provides services for making and receiving text messages and phone calls. The group then used their access to Twilio to attack at least 163 of its customers. According to prosecutors, the group mainly sought to steal cryptocurrency from victim companies and their employees.

“The defendants allegedly preyed on unsuspecting victims in this phishing scheme and used their personal information as a gateway to steal millions in their cryptocurrency accounts,” said Akil Davis, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office.

Many of the hacking group’s phishing domains were registered through the registrar NameCheap, and FBI investigators said records obtained from NameCheap showed the person who managed those phishing websites did so from an Internet address in Scotland. The feds then obtained records from Virgin Media, which showed the address was leased for several months to Tyler Buchanan, a 22-year-old from Dundee, Scotland.

As first reported here in June, Buchanan was arrested in Spain as he tried to board a flight bound for Italy. The Spanish police told local media that Buchanan, who allegedly went by the alias “Tylerb,” at one time possessed Bitcoins worth $27 million.

The government says much of Tylerb’s cryptocurrency wealth was the result of successful SIM-swapping attacks, wherein crooks transfer the target’s phone number to a device they control and intercept any text messages or phone calls sent to the victim — including one-time passcodes for authentication, or password reset links sent via SMS.

According to several SIM-swapping channels on Telegram where Tylerb was known to frequent, rival SIM-swappers hired thugs to invade his home in February 2023. Those accounts state that the intruders assaulted Tylerb’s mother in the home invasion, and that they threatened to burn him with a blowtorch if he didn’t give up the keys to his cryptocurrency wallets. Tylerb was reputed to have fled the United Kingdom after that assault.

Prosecutors allege Tylerb worked closely on SIM-swapping attacks with Noah Michael Urban, another alleged Scattered Spider member from Palm Coast, Fla. who went by the handles “Sosa,” “Elijah,” and “Kingbob.”

Sosa was known to be a top member of the broader cybercriminal community online known as “The Com,” wherein hackers boast loudly about high-profile exploits and hacks that almost invariably begin with social engineering — tricking people over the phone, email or SMS into giving away credentials that allow remote access to corporate networks.

In January 2024, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that Urban had been arrested in Florida in connection with multiple SIM-swapping attacks. That story noted that Sosa’s alter ego Kingbob routinely targeted people in the recording industry to steal and share “grails,” a slang term used to describe unreleased music recordings from popular artists.

FBI investigators identified a fourth alleged member of the conspiracy – Ahmed Hossam Eldin Elbadawy, 23, of College Station, Texas — after he used a portion of cryptocurrency funds stolen from a victim company to pay for an account used to register phishing domains.

The indictment unsealed Wednesday alleges Elbadawy controlled a number of cryptocurrency accounts used to receive stolen funds, along with another Texas man — Evans Onyeaka Osiebo, 20, of Dallas.

Members of Scattered Spider are reputed to have been involved in a September 2023 ransomware attack against the MGM Resorts hotel chain that quickly brought multiple MGM casinos to a standstill. In September 2024, KrebsOnSecurity reported that a 17-year-old from the United Kingdom was arrested last year by U.K. police as part of an FBI investigation into the MGM hack.

Evans, Elbadawy, Osiebo and Urban were all charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, one count of conspiracy, and one count of aggravated identity theft. Buchanan, who is named as an indicted co-conspirator, was charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft.

A Justice Department press release states that if convicted, each defendant would face a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison for conspiracy to commit wire fraud, up to five years in federal prison for the conspiracy count, and a mandatory two-year consecutive prison sentence for aggravated identity theft. Buchanan would face up to 20 years in prison for the wire fraud count as well.

Further reading:

The redacted complaint against Buchanan (PDF)

Charges against Urban and the other defendants (PDF).

An Interview With the Target & Home Depot Hacker

In December 2023, KrebsOnSecurity revealed the real-life identity of Rescator, the nickname used by a Russian cybercriminal who sold more than 100 million payment cards stolen from Target and Home Depot between 2013 and 2014. Moscow resident Mikhail Shefel, who confirmed using the Rescator identity in a recent interview, also admitted reaching out because he is broke and seeking publicity for several new money making schemes.

Mr. Shefel, who recently changed his legal surname to Lenin, was the star of last year’s story, Ten Years Later, New Clues in the Target Breach. That investigation detailed how the 38-year-old Shefel adopted the nickname Rescator while working as vice president of payments at ChronoPay, a Russian financial company that paid spammers to advertise fake antivirus scams, male enhancement drugs and knockoff pharmaceuticals.

Mr. Shefel did not respond to requests for comment in advance of that December 2023 profile. Nor did he respond to reporting here in January 2024 that he ran an IT company with a 34-year-old Russian man named Aleksandr Ermakov, who was sanctioned by authorities in Australia, the U.K. and U.S. for stealing data on nearly 10 million customers of the Australian health insurance giant Medibank.

But not long after KrebsOnSecurity reported in April that Shefel/Rescator also was behind the theft of Social Security and tax information from a majority of South Carolina residents in 2012, Mr. Shefel began contacting this author with the pretense of setting the record straight on his alleged criminal hacking activities.

In a series of live video chats and text messages, Mr. Shefel confirmed he indeed went by the Rescator identity for several years, and that he did operate a slew of websites between 2013 and 2015 that sold payment card data stolen from Target, Home Depot and a number of other nationwide retail chains.

Shefel claims the true mastermind behind the Target and other retail breaches was Dmitri Golubov, an infamous Ukrainian hacker known as the co-founder of Carderplanet, among the earliest Russian-language cybercrime forums focused on payment card fraud. Mr. Golubov could not be reached for comment, and Shefel says he no longer has the laptop containing evidence to support that claim.

Shefel asserts he and his team were responsible for developing the card-stealing malware that Golubov’s hackers installed on Target and Home Depot payment terminals, and that at the time he was technical director of a long-running Russian cybercrime community called Lampeduza.

“My nickname was MikeMike, and I worked with Dmitri Golubov and made technologies for him,” Shefel said. “I’m also godfather of his second son.”

A week after breaking the story about the 2013 data breach at Target, KrebsOnSecurity published Who’s Selling Cards from Target?, which identified a Ukrainian man who went by the nickname Helkern as Rescator’s original identity. But Shefel claims Helkern was subordinate to Golubov, and that he was responsible for introducing the two men more than a decade ago.

“Helkern was my friend, I [set up a] meeting with Golubov and him in 2013,” Shefel said. “That was in Odessa, Ukraine. I was often in that city, and [it’s where] I met my second wife.”

Shefel claims he made several hundred thousand dollars selling cards stolen by Golubov’s Ukraine-based hacking crew, but that not long after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 Golubov cut him out of the business and replaced Shefel’s malware coding team with programmers in Ukraine.

Golubov was arrested in Ukraine in 2005 as part of a joint investigation with multiple U.S. federal law enforcement agencies, but his political connections in the country ensured his case went nowhere. Golubov later earned immunity from prosecution by becoming an elected politician and founding the Internet Party of Ukraine, which called for free internet for all, the creation of country-wide “hacker schools” and the “computerization of the entire economy.”

Mr. Shefel says he stopped selling stolen payment cards after being pushed out of the business, and invested his earnings in a now-defunct Russian search engine called tf[.]org. He also apparently ran a business called click2dad[.]net that paid people to click on ads for Russian government employment opportunities.

When those enterprises fizzled out, Shefel reverted to selling malware coding services for hire under the nickname “Getsend“; this claim checks out, as Getsend for many years advertised the same Telegram handle that Shefel used in our recent chats and video calls.

Shefel acknowledged that his outreach was motivated by a desire to publicize several new business ventures. None of those will be mentioned here because Shefel is already using my December 2023 profile of him to advertise what appears to be a pyramid scheme, and to remind others within the Russian hacker community of his skills and accomplishments.

Shefel says he is now flat broke, and that he currently has little to show for a storied hacking career. The Moscow native said he recently heard from his ex-wife, who had read last year’s story about him and was suddenly wondering where he’d hidden all of his earnings.

More urgently, Shefel needs money to stay out of prison. In February, he and Ermakov were arrested on charges of operating a short-lived ransomware affiliate program in 2021 called Sugar (a.k.a. Sugar Locker), which targeted single computers and end-users instead of corporations. Shefel is due to face those charges in a Moscow court on Friday, Nov. 15, 2024. Ermakov was recently found guilty and given two years probation.

Shefel claims his Sugar ransomware affiliate program was a bust, and never generated any profits. Russia is known for not prosecuting criminal hackers within its borders who scrupulously avoid attacking Russian businesses and consumers. When asked why he now faces prosecution over Sugar, Shefel said he’s certain the investigation was instigated by  Pyotr “Peter” Vrublevsky — the son of his former boss at ChronoPay.

ChronoPay founder and CEO Pavel Vrublevsky was the key subject of my 2014 book Spam Nation, which described his role as head of one of Russia’s most notorious criminal spam operations.

Vrublevsky Sr. recently declared bankruptcy, and is currently in prison on fraud charges. Russian authorities allege Vrublevsky operated several fraudulent SMS-based payment schemes. They also accused Vrublevsky of facilitating money laundering for Hydra, the largest Russian darknet market at the time. Hydra trafficked in illegal drugs and financial services, including cryptocurrency tumbling for money laundering, exchange services between cryptocurrency and Russian rubles, and the sale of falsified documents and hacking services.

However, in 2022 KrebsOnSecurity reported on a more likely reason for Vrublevsky’s latest criminal charges: He’d been extensively documenting the nicknames, real names and criminal exploits of Russian hackers who worked with the protection of corrupt officials in the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), and operating a Telegram channel that threatened to expose alleged nefarious dealings by Russian financial executives.

Shefel believes Vrublevsky’s son Peter paid corrupt cops to levy criminal charges against him after reporting the youth to Moscow police, allegedly for walking around in public with a loaded firearm. Shefel says the Russian authorities told the younger Vrublevsky that he had lodged the firearms complaint.

In July 2024, the Russian news outlet Izvestia published a lengthy investigation into Peter Vrublevsky, alleging that the younger son took up his father’s mantle and was responsible for advertising Sprut, a Russian-language narcotics bazaar that sprang to life after the Hydra darknet market was shut down by international law enforcement agencies in 2022.

Izvestia reports that Peter Vrublevsky is currently living in Switzerland, where he reportedly fled in 2022 after being “arrested in absentia” in Russia on charges of running a violent group that could be hired via Telegram to conduct a range of physical attacks in real life, including firebombings and muggings.

Shefel claims his former partner Golubov was involved in the development and dissemination of early ransomware strains, including Cryptolocker, and that Golubov remains active in the cybercrime community.

Meanwhile, Mr. Shefel portrays himself as someone who is barely scraping by with the few odd coding jobs that come his way each month. Incredibly, the day after our initial interview via Telegram, Shefel proposed going into business together.

By way of example, he suggested maybe a company centered around recovering lost passwords for cryptocurrency accounts, or perhaps a series of online retail stores that sold cheap Chinese goods at a steep markup in the United States.

“Hi, how are you?” he inquired. “Maybe we can open business?”

FBI: Spike in Hacked Police Emails, Fake Subpoenas

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is urging police departments and governments worldwide to beef up security around their email systems, citing a recent increase in cybercriminal services that use hacked police email accounts to send unauthorized subpoenas and customer data requests to U.S.-based technology companies.

In an alert (PDF) published this week, the FBI said it has seen an uptick in postings on criminal forums regarding the process of emergency data requests (EDRs) and the sale of email credentials stolen from police departments and government agencies.

“Cybercriminals are likely gaining access to compromised US and foreign government email addresses and using them to conduct fraudulent emergency data requests to US based companies, exposing the personal information of customers to further use for criminal purposes,” the FBI warned.

In the United States, when federal, state or local law enforcement agencies wish to obtain information about an account at a technology provider — such as the account’s email address, or what Internet addresses a specific cell phone account has used in the past — they must submit an official court-ordered warrant or subpoena.

Virtually all major technology companies serving large numbers of users online have departments that routinely review and process such requests, which are typically granted (eventually, and at least in part) as long as the proper documents are provided and the request appears to come from an email address connected to an actual police department domain name.

In some cases, a cybercriminal will offer to forge a court-approved subpoena and send that through a hacked police or government email account. But increasingly, thieves are relying on fake EDRs, which allow investigators to attest that people will be bodily harmed or killed unless a request for account data is granted expeditiously.

The trouble is, these EDRs largely bypass any official review and do not require the requester to supply any court-approved documents. Also, it is difficult for a company that receives one of these EDRs to immediately determine whether it is legitimate.

In this scenario, the receiving company finds itself caught between two unsavory outcomes: Failing to immediately comply with an EDR — and potentially having someone’s blood on their hands — or possibly leaking a customer record to the wrong person.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, compliance with such requests tends to be extremely high. For example, in its most recent transparency report (PDF) Verizon said it received more than 127,000 law enforcement demands for customer data in the second half of 2023 — including more than 36,000 EDRs — and that the company provided records in response to approximately 90 percent of requests.

One English-speaking cybercriminal who goes by the nicknames “Pwnstar” and “Pwnipotent” has been selling fake EDR services on both Russian-language and English cybercrime forums. Their prices range from $1,000 to $3,000 per successful request, and they claim to control “gov emails from over 25 countries,” including Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Hungary, India, Kenya, Jordan, Lebanon, Laos, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Vietnam.

“I cannot 100% guarantee every order will go through,” Pwnstar explained. “This is social engineering at the highest level and there will be failed attempts at times. Don’t be discouraged. You can use escrow and I give full refund back if EDR doesn’t go through and you don’t receive your information.”

A review of EDR vendors across many cybercrime forums shows that some fake EDR vendors sell the ability to send phony police requests to specific social media platforms, including forged court-approved documents. Others simply sell access to hacked government or police email accounts, and leave it up to the buyer to forge any needed documents.

“When you get account, it’s yours, your account, your liability,” reads an ad in October on BreachForums. “Unlimited Emergency Data Requests. Once Paid, the Logins are completely Yours. Reset as you please. You would need to Forge Documents to Successfully Emergency Data Request.”

Still other fake EDR service vendors claim to sell hacked or fraudulently created accounts on Kodex, a startup that aims to help tech companies do a better job screening out phony law enforcement data requests. Kodex is trying to tackle the problem of fake EDRs by working directly with the data providers to pool information about police or government officials submitting these requests, with an eye toward making it easier for everyone to spot an unauthorized EDR.

If police or government officials wish to request records regarding Coinbase customers, for example, they must first register an account on Kodexglobal.com. Kodex’s systems then assign that requestor a score or credit rating, wherein officials who have a long history of sending valid legal requests will have a higher rating than someone sending an EDR for the first time.

It is not uncommon to see fake EDR vendors claim the ability to send data requests through Kodex, with some even sharing redacted screenshots of police accounts at Kodex.

Matt Donahue is the former FBI agent who founded Kodex in 2021. Donahue said just because someone can use a legitimate police department or government email to create a Kodex account doesn’t mean that user will be able to send anything. Donahue said even if one customer gets a fake request, Kodex is able to prevent the same thing from happening to another.

Kodex told KrebsOnSecurity that over the past 12 months it has processed a total of 1,597 EDRs, and that 485 of those requests (~30 percent) failed a second-level verification. Kodex reports it has suspended nearly 4,000 law enforcement users in the past year, including:

-1,521 from the Asia-Pacific region;
-1,290 requests from Europe, the Middle East and Asia;
-460 from police departments and agencies in the United States;
-385 from entities in Latin America, and;
-285 from Brazil.

Donahue said 60 technology companies are now routing all law enforcement data requests through Kodex, including an increasing number of financial institutions and cryptocurrency platforms. He said one concern shared by recent prospective customers is that crooks are seeking to use phony law enforcement requests to freeze and in some cases seize funds in specific accounts.

“What’s being conflated [with EDRs] is anything that doesn’t involve a formal judge’s signature or legal process,” Donahue said. “That can include control over data, like an account freeze or preservation request.”

In a hypothetical example, a scammer uses a hacked government email account to request that a service provider place a hold on a specific bank or crypto account that is allegedly subject to a garnishment order, or party to crime that is globally sanctioned, such as terrorist financing or child exploitation.

A few days or weeks later, the same impersonator returns with a request to seize funds in the account, or to divert the funds to a custodial wallet supposedly controlled by government investigators.

“In terms of overall social engineering attacks, the more you have a relationship with someone the more they’re going to trust you,” Donahue said. “If you send them a freeze order, that’s a way to establish trust, because [the first time] they’re not asking for information. They’re just saying, ‘Hey can you do me a favor?’ And that makes the [recipient] feel valued.”

Echoing the FBI’s warning, Donahue said far too many police departments in the United States and other countries have poor account security hygiene, and often do not enforce basic account security precautions — such as requiring phishing-resistant multifactor authentication.

How are cybercriminals typically gaining access to police and government email accounts? Donahue said it’s still mostly email-based phishing, and credentials that are stolen by opportunistic malware infections and sold on the dark web. But as bad as things are internationally, he said, many law enforcement entities in the United States still have much room for improvement in account security.

“Unfortunately, a lot of this is phishing or malware campaigns,” Donahue said. “A lot of global police agencies don’t have stringent cybersecurity hygiene, but even U.S. dot-gov emails get hacked. Over the last nine months, I’ve reached out to CISA (the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) over a dozen times about .gov email addresses that were compromised and that CISA was unaware of.”

Canadian Man Arrested in Snowflake Data Extortions

A 25-year-old man in Ontario, Canada has been arrested for allegedly stealing data from and extorting more than 160 companies that used the cloud data service Snowflake.

On October 30, Canadian authorities arrested Alexander Moucka, a.k.a. Connor Riley Moucka of Kitchener, Ontario, on a provisional arrest warrant from the United States. Bloomberg first reported Moucka’s alleged ties to the Snowflake hacks on Monday.

At the end of 2023, malicious hackers learned that many large companies had uploaded huge volumes of sensitive customer data to Snowflake accounts that were protected with little more than a username and password (no multi-factor authentication required). After scouring darknet markets for stolen Snowflake account credentials, the hackers began raiding the data storage repositories used by some of the world’s largest corporations.

Among those was AT&T, which disclosed in July that cybercriminals had stolen personal information and phone and text message records for roughly 110 million people — nearly all of its customers. Wired.com reported in July that AT&T paid a hacker $370,000 to delete stolen phone records.

A report on the extortion attacks from the incident response firm Mandiant notes that Snowflake victim companies were privately approached by the hackers, who demanded a ransom in exchange for a promise not to sell or leak the stolen data. All told, more than 160 Snowflake customers were relieved of data, including TicketMaster, Lending Tree, Advance Auto Parts and Neiman Marcus.

Moucka is alleged to have used the hacker handles Judische and Waifu, among many others. These monikers correspond to a prolific cybercriminal whose exploits were the subject of a recent story published here about the overlap between Western, English-speaking cybercriminals and extremist groups that harass and extort minors into harming themselves or others.

On May 2, 2024, Judische claimed on the fraud-focused Telegram channel Star Chat that they had hacked Santander Bank, one of the first known Snowflake victims. Judische would repeat that claim in Star Chat on May 13 — the day before Santander publicly disclosed a data breach — and would periodically blurt out the names of other Snowflake victims before their data even went up for sale on the cybercrime forums.

404 Media reports that at a court hearing in Ontario this morning, Moucka called in from a prison phone and said he was seeking legal aid to hire an attorney.

TELECOM DOMINOES

Mandiant has attributed the Snowflake compromises to a group it calls “UNC5537,” with members based in North America and Turkey. Sources close to the investigation tell KrebsOnSecurity the UNC5537 member in Turkey is John Erin Binns, an elusive American man indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for a 2021 breach at T-Mobile that exposed the personal information of at least 76.6 million customers.

Update: The Justice Department has unsealed an indictment (PDF) against Moucka and Binns, charging them with one count of conspiracy; 10 counts of wire fraud; four counts of computer fraud and abuse; two counts of extortion in relation to computer fraud; and two counts aggravated identity theft.

In a statement on Moucka’s arrest, Mandiant said UNC5537 aka Alexander ‘Connor’ Moucka has proven to be one of the most consequential threat actors of 2024.

“In April 2024, UNC5537 launched a campaign, systematically compromising misconfigured SaaS instances across over a hundred organizations,” wrote Austin Larsen, Mandiant’s senior threat analyst. “The operation, which left organizations reeling from significant data loss and extortion attempts, highlighted the alarming scale of harm an individual can cause using off-the-shelf tools.”

Sources involved in the investigation said UNC5537 has focused on hacking into telecommunications companies around the world. Those sources told KrebsOnSecurity that Binns and Judische are suspected of stealing data from India’s largest state-run telecommunications firm Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BNSL), and that the duo even bragged about being able to intercept or divert phone calls and text messages for a large portion of the population of India.

Judische appears to have outsourced the sale of databases from victim companies who refuse to pay, delegating some of that work to a cybercriminal who uses the nickname Kiberphant0m on multiple forums. In late May 2024, Kiberphant0m began advertising the sale of hundreds of gigabytes of data stolen from BSNL.

“Information is worth several million dollars but I’m selling for pretty cheap,” Kiberphant0m wrote of the BSNL data in a post on the English-language cybercrime community Breach Forums. “Negotiate a deal in Telegram.”

Also in May 2024, Kiberphant0m took to the Russian-language hacking forum XSS to sell more than 250 gigabytes of data stolen from an unnamed mobile telecom provider in Asia, including a database of all active customers and software allowing the sending of text messages to all customers.

On September 3, 2024, Kiberphant0m posted a sales thread on XSS titled “Selling American Telecom Access (100B+ Revenue).” Kiberphant0m’s asking price of $200,000 was apparently too high because they reposted the sales thread on Breach Forums a month later, with a headline that more clearly explained the data was stolen from Verizon‘s “push-to-talk” (PTT) customers — primarily U.S. government agencies and first responders.

404Media reported recently that the breach does not appear to impact the main consumer Verizon network. Rather, the hackers broke into a third party provider and stole data on Verizon’s PTT systems, which are a separate product marketed towards public sector agencies, enterprises, and small businesses to communicate internally.

INTERVIEW WITH JUDISCHE

Investigators say Moucka shared a home in Kitchener with other tenants, but not his family. His mother was born in Chechnya, and he speaks Russian in addition to French and English. Moucka’s father died of a drug overdose at age 26, when the defendant was roughly five years old.

A person claiming to be Judische began communicating with this author more than three months ago on Signal after KrebsOnSecurity started asking around about hacker nicknames previously used by Judische over the years.

Judische admitted to stealing and ransoming data from Snowflake customers, but he said he’s not interested in selling the information, and that others have done this with some of the data sets he stole.

“I’m not really someone that sells data unless it’s crypto [databases] or credit cards because they’re the only thing I can find buyers for that actually have money for the data,” Judische told KrebsOnSecurity. “The rest is just ransom.”

Judische has sent this reporter dozens of unsolicited and often profane messages from several different Signal accounts, all of which claimed to be an anonymous tipster sharing different identifying details for Judische. This appears to have been an elaborate effort by Judische to “detrace” his movements online and muddy the waters about his identity.

Judische frequently claimed he had unparalleled “opsec” or operational security, a term that refers to the ability to compartmentalize and obfuscate one’s tracks online. In an effort to show he was one step ahead of investigators, Judische shared information indicating someone had given him a Mandiant researcher’s assessment of who and where they thought he was. Mandiant says those were discussion points shared with select reporters in advance of the researcher’s recent talk at the LabsCon security conference.

But in a conversation with KrebsOnSecurity on October 26, Judische acknowledged it was likely that the authorities were closing in on him, and said he would seriously answer certain questions about his personal life.

“They’re coming after me for sure,” he said.

In several previous conversations, Judische referenced suffering from an unspecified personality disorder, and when pressed said he has a condition called “schizotypal personality disorder” (STPD).

According to the Cleveland Clinic, schizotypal personality disorder is marked by a consistent pattern of intense discomfort with relationships and social interactions: “People with STPD have unusual thoughts, speech and behaviors, which usually hinder their ability to form and maintain relationships.”

Judische said he was prescribed medication for his psychological issues, but that he doesn’t take his meds. Which might explain why he never leaves his home.

“I never go outside,” Judische allowed. “I’ve never had a friend or true relationship not online nor in person. I see people as vehicles to achieve my ends no matter how friendly I may seem on the surface, which you can see by how fast I discard people who are loyal or [that] I’ve known a long time.”

Judische later admitted he doesn’t have an official STPD diagnosis from a physician, but said he knows that he exhibits all the signs of someone with this condition.

“I can’t actually get diagnosed with that either,” Judische shared. “Most countries put you on lists and restrict you from certain things if you have it.”

Asked whether he has always lived at his current residence, Judische replied that he had to leave his hometown for his own safety.

“I can’t live safely where I’m from without getting robbed or arrested,” he said, without offering more details.

A source familiar with the investigation said Moucka previously lived in Quebec, which he allegedly fled after being charged with harassing others on the social network Discord.

Judische claims to have made at least $4 million in his Snowflake extortions. Judische said he and others frequently targeted business process outsourcing (BPO) companies, staffing firms that handle customer service for a wide range of organizations. They also went after managed service providers (MSPs) that oversee IT support and security for multiple companies, he claimed.

“Snowflake isn’t even the biggest BPO/MSP multi-company dataset on our networks, but what’s been exfiltrated from them is well over 100TB,” Judische bragged. “Only ones that don’t pay get disclosed (unless they disclose it themselves). A lot of them don’t even do their SEC filing and just pay us to fuck off.”

INTEL SECRETS

The other half of UNC5537 — 24-year-old John Erin Binns — was arrested in Turkey in late May 2024, and currently resides in a Turkish prison. However, it is unclear if Binns faces any immediate threat of extradition to the United States, where he is currently wanted on criminal hacking charges tied to the 2021 breach at T-Mobile.

A person familiar with the investigation said Binns’s application for Turkish citizenship was inexplicably approved after his incarceration, leading to speculation that Binns may have bought his way out of a sticky legal situation.

Under the Turkish constitution, a Turkish citizen cannot be extradited to a foreign state. Turkey has been criticized for its “golden passport” program, which provides citizenship and sanctuary for anyone willing to pay several hundred thousand dollars.

Binns’s alleged hacker alter egos — “IRDev” and “IntelSecrets” — were at once feared and revered on several cybercrime-focused Telegram communities, because he was known to possess a powerful weapon: A massive botnet. From reviewing the Telegram channels Binns frequented, we can see that others in those communities — including Judische — heavily relied on Binns and his botnet for a variety of cybercriminal purposes.

The IntelSecrets nickname corresponds to an individual who has claimed responsibility for modifying the source code for the Mirai “Internet of Things” botnet to create a variant known as “Satori,” and supplying it to others who used it for criminal gain and were later caught and prosecuted.

Since 2020, Binns has filed a flood of lawsuits naming various federal law enforcement officers and agencies — including the FBI, the CIA, and the U.S. Special Operations Command (PDF), demanding that the government turn over information collected about him and seeking restitution for his alleged kidnapping at the hands of the CIA.

Binns claims he was kidnapped in Turkey and subjected to various forms of psychological and physical torture. According to Binns, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) falsely told their counterparts in Turkey that he was a supporter or member of the Islamic State (ISIS), a claim he says led to his detention and torture by the Turkish authorities.

However, in a 2020 lawsuit he filed against the CIA, Binns himself acknowledged having visited a previously ISIS-controlled area of Syria prior to moving to Turkey in 2017.

Sources familiar with the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity that Binns was so paranoid about possible surveillance on him by American and Turkish intelligence agencies that his erratic behavior and online communications actually brought about the very government snooping that he feared.

In several online chats in late 2023 on Discord, IRDev lamented being lured into a law enforcement sting operation after trying to buy a rocket launcher online. A person close to the investigation confirmed that at the beginning of 2023, IRDev began making earnest inquiries about how to purchase a Stinger, an American-made portable weapon that operates as an infrared surface-to-air missile.

Sources told KrebsOnSecurity Binns’ repeated efforts to purchase the projectile earned him multiple visits from the Turkish authorities, who were justifiably curious why he kept seeking to acquire such a powerful weapon.

WAIFU

A careful study of Judische’s postings on Telegram and Discord since 2019 shows this user is more widely known under the nickname “Waifu,” a moniker that corresponds to one of the more accomplished “SIM swappers” in the English-language cybercrime community over the years.

SIM swapping involves phishing, tricking or bribing mobile phone company employees for credentials needed to redirect a target’s mobile phone number to a device the attackers control — allowing thieves to intercept incoming text messages and phone calls.

Several SIM-swapping channels on Telegram maintain a frequently updated leaderboard of the 100 richest SIM-swappers, as well as the hacker handles associated with specific cybercrime groups (Waifu is ranked #24). That list has long included Waifu on a roster of hackers for a group that called itself “Beige.”

The term “Beige Group” came up in reporting on two stories published here in 2020. The first was in an August 2020 piece called Voice Phishers Targeting Corporate VPNs, which warned that the COVID-19 epidemic had brought a wave of targeted voice phishing attacks that tried to trick work-at-home employees into providing access to their employers’ networks. Frequent targets of the Beige group included employees at numerous top U.S. banks, ISPs, and mobile phone providers.

The second time Beige Group was mentioned by sources was in reporting on a breach at the domain registrar GoDaddy. In November 2020, intruders thought to be associated with the Beige Group tricked a GoDaddy employee into installing malicious software, and with that access they were able to redirect the web and email traffic for multiple cryptocurrency trading platforms. Other frequent targets of the Beige group included employees at numerous top U.S. banks, ISPs, and mobile phone providers.

Judische’s various Telegram identities have long claimed involvement in the 2020 GoDaddy breach, and he didn’t deny his alleged role when asked directly. Judische said he prefers voice phishing or “vishing” attacks that result in the target installing data-stealing malware, as opposed to tricking the user into entering their username, password and one-time code.

“Most of my ops involve malware [because] credential access burns too fast,” Judische explained.

CRACKDOWN ON HARM GROUPS?

The Telegram channels that the Judische/Waifu accounts frequented over the years show this user divided their time between posting in channels dedicated to financial cybercrime, and harassing and stalking others in harm communities like Leak Society and Court.

Both of these Telegram communities are known for victimizing children through coordinated online campaigns of extortion, doxing, swatting and harassment. People affiliated with harm groups like Court and Leak Society will often recruit new members by lurking on gaming platforms, social media sites and mobile applications that are popular with young people, including Discord, Minecraft, Roblox, Steam, Telegram, and Twitch.

“This type of offence usually starts with a direct message through gaming platforms and can move to more private chatrooms on other virtual platforms, typically one with video enabled features, where the conversation quickly becomes sexualized or violent,” warns a recent alert from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) about the rise of sextortion groups on social media channels.

“One of the tactics being used by these actors is sextortion, however, they are not using it to extract money or for sexual gratification,” the RCMP continued. “Instead they use it to further manipulate and control victims to produce more harmful and violent content as part of their ideological objectives and radicalization pathway.”

Some of the largest such known groups include those that go by the names 764, CVLT, Kaskar, 7997, 8884, 2992, 6996, 555, Slit Town, 545, 404, NMK, 303, and H3ll.

On the various cybercrime-oriented channels Judische frequented, he often lied about his or others’ involvement in various breaches. But Judische also at times shared nuggets of truth about his past, particularly when discussing the early history and membership of specific Telegram- and Discord-based cybercrime and harm groups.

Judische claimed in multiple chats, including on Leak Society and Court, that they were an early member of the Atomwaffen Division (AWD), a white supremacy group whose members are suspected of having committed multiple murders in the U.S. since 2017.

In 2019, KrebsOnSecurity exposed how a loose-knit group of neo-Nazis, some of whom were affiliated with AWD, had doxed and/or swatted nearly three dozen journalists at a range of media publications. Swatting involves communicating a false police report of a bomb threat or hostage situation and tricking authorities into sending a heavily armed police response to a targeted address.

Judsiche also told a fellow denizen of Court that years ago he was active in an older harm community called “RapeLash,” a truly vile Discord server known for attracting Atomwaffen members. A 2018 retrospective on RapeLash posted to the now defunct neo-Nazi forum Fascist Forge explains that RapeLash was awash in gory, violent images and child pornography.

A Fascist Forge member named “Huddy” recalled that RapeLash was the third incarnation of an extremist community also known as “FashWave,” short for Fascist Wave.

“I have no real knowledge of what happened with the intermediary phase known as ‘FashWave 2.0,’ but FashWave 3.0 houses multiple known Satanists and other degenerates connected with AWD, one of which got arrested on possession of child pornography charges, last I heard,” Huddy shared.

In June 2024, a Mandiant employee told Bloomberg that UNC5537 members have made death threats against cybersecurity experts investigating the hackers, and that in one case the group used artificial intelligence to create fake nude photos of a researcher to harass them.

Allison Nixon is chief research officer with the New York-based cybersecurity firm Unit 221B. Nixon is among several researchers who have faced harassment and specific threats of physical violence from Judische.

Nixon said Judische is likely to argue in court that his self-described psychological disorder(s) should somehow excuse his long career in cybercrime and in harming others.

“They ran a misinformation campaign in a sloppy attempt to cover up the hacking campaign,” Nixon said of Judische. “Coverups are an acknowledgment of guilt, which will undermine a mental illness defense in court. We expect that violent hackers from the [cybercrime community] will experience increasingly harsh sentences as the crackdown continues.”

5:34 p.m. ET: Updated story to include a clarification from Mandiant. Corrected Moucka’s age.

Nov. 21, 2024: Included link to a criminal indictment against Moucka and Binns.

Booking.com Phishers May Leave You With Reservations

A number of cybercriminal innovations are making it easier for scammers to cash in on your upcoming travel plans. This story examines a recent spear-phishing campaign that ensued when a California hotel had its booking.com credentials stolen. We’ll also explore an array of cybercrime services aimed at phishers who target hotels that rely on the world’s most visited travel website.

According to the market share website statista.com, booking.com is by far the Internet’s busiest travel service, with nearly 550 million visits in September. KrebsOnSecurity last week heard from a reader whose close friend received a targeted phishing message within the Booking mobile app just minutes after making a reservation at a California hotel.

The missive bore the name of the hotel and referenced details from their reservation, claiming that booking.com’s anti-fraud system required additional information about the customer before the reservation could be finalized.

In an email to KrebsOnSecurity, booking.com confirmed one of its partners had suffered a security incident that allowed unauthorized access to customer booking information.

“Our security teams are currently investigating the incident you mentioned and can confirm that it was indeed a phishing attack targeting one of our accommodation partners, which unfortunately is not a new situation and quite common across industries,” booking.com replied. “Importantly, we want to clarify that there has been no compromise of Booking.com’s internal systems.”

Booking.com said it now requires 2FA, which forces partners to provide a one-time passcode from a mobile authentication app (Pulse) in addition to a username and password.

“2FA is required and enforced, including for partners to access payment details from customers securely,” a booking.com spokesperson wrote. “That’s why the cybercriminals follow-up with messages to try and get customers to make payments outside of our platform.”

“That said, the phishing attacks stem from partners’ machines being compromised with malware, which has enabled them to also gain access to the partners’ accounts and to send the messages that your reader has flagged,” they continued.

It’s unclear, however, if the company’s 2FA requirement is enforced for all or just newer partners. Booking.com did not respond to questions about that, and its current account security advice urges customers to enable 2FA.

In November 2023, the security firm SecureWorks detailed how scammers targeted booking.com hospitality partners with data-stealing malware. SecureWorks said these attacks had been going on since at least March 2023.

“The hotel did not enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) on its Booking.com access, so logging into the account with the stolen credentials was easy,” SecureWorks said of the booking.com partner it investigated.

In June 2024, booking.com told the BBC that phishing attacks targeting travelers had increased 900 percent, and that thieves taking advantage of new artificial intelligence (AI) tools were the primary driver of this trend.

Booking.com told the BCC the company had started using AI to fight AI-based phishing attacks. Booking.com’s statement said their investments in that arena “blocked 85 million fraudulent reservations over more than 1.5 million phishing attempts in 2023.”

The domain name in the phony booking.com website sent to our reader’s friend — guestssecureverification[.]com — was registered to the email address ilotirabec207@gmail.com. According to DomainTools.com, this email address was used to register more than 700 other phishing domains in the past month alone.

Many of the 700+ domains appear to target hospitality companies, including platforms like booking.com and Airbnb. Others seem crafted to phish users of Shopify, Steam, and a variety of financial platforms. A full, defanged list of domains is available here.

A cursory review of recent posts across dozens of cybercrime forums monitored by the security firm Intel 471 shows there is a great demand for compromised booking.com accounts belonging to hotels and other partners.

One post last month on the Russian-language hacking forum BHF offered up to $5,000 for each hotel account. This seller claims to help people monetize hacked booking.com partners, apparently by using the stolen credentials to set up fraudulent listings.

A service advertised on the English-language crime community BreachForums in October courts phishers who may need help with certain aspects of their phishing campaigns targeting booking.com partners. Those include more than two million hotel email addresses, and services designed to help phishers organize large volumes of phished records. Customers can interact with the service via an automated Telegram bot.

Some cybercriminals appear to have used compromised booking.com accounts to power their own travel agencies catering to fellow scammers, with up to 50 percent discounts on hotel reservations through booking.com. Others are selling ready-to-use “config” files designed to make it simple to conduct automated login attempts against booking.com administrator accounts.

SecureWorks found the phishers targeting booking.com partner hotels used malware to steal credentials. But today’s thieves can just as easily just visit crime bazaars online and purchase stolen credentials to cloud services that do not enforce 2FA for all accounts.

That is exactly what transpired over the past year with many customers of the cloud data storage giant Snowflake. In late 2023, cybercriminals figured out that while tons of companies had stashed enormous amounts of customer data at Snowflake, many of those customer accounts were not protected by 2FA.

Snowflake responded by making 2FA mandatory for all new customers. But that change came only after thieves used stolen credentials to siphon data from 160 companies — including AT&T, Lending Tree and TicketMaster.

The Global Surveillance Free-for-All in Mobile Ad Data

Not long ago, the ability to digitally track someone’s daily movements just by knowing their home address, employer, or place of worship was considered a dangerous power that should remain only within the purview of nation states. But a new lawsuit in a likely constitutional battle over a New Jersey privacy law shows that anyone can now access this capability, thanks to a proliferation of commercial services that hoover up the digital exhaust emitted by widely-used mobile apps and websites.

Delaware-based Atlas Data Privacy Corp. helps its users remove their personal information from the clutches of consumer data brokers, and from people-search services online. Backed by millions of dollars in litigation financing, Atlas so far this year has sued 151 consumer data brokers on behalf of a class that includes more than 20,000 New Jersey law enforcement officers who are signed up for Atlas services.

Atlas alleges all of these data brokers have ignored repeated warnings that they are violating Daniel’s Law, a New Jersey statute allowing law enforcement, government personnel, judges and their families to have their information completely removed from commercial data brokers. Daniel’s Law was passed in 2020 after the death of 20-year-old Daniel Anderl, who was killed in a violent attack targeting a federal judge — his mother.

Last week, Atlas invoked Daniel’s Law in a lawsuit (PDF) against Babel Street, a little-known technology company incorporated in Reston, Va. Babel Street’s core product allows customers to draw a digital polygon around nearly any location on a map of the world, and view a slightly dated (by a few days) time-lapse history of the mobile devices seen coming in and out of the specified area.

Babel Street’s LocateX platform also allows customers to track individual mobile users by their Mobile Advertising ID or MAID, a unique, alphanumeric identifier built into all Google Android and Apple mobile devices.

Babel Street can offer this tracking capability by consuming location data and other identifying information that is collected by many websites and broadcast to dozens and sometimes hundreds of ad networks that may wish to bid on showing their ad to a particular user.

In an interview, Atlas said a private investigator they hired was offered a free trial of Babel Street, which the investigator was able to use to determine the home address and daily movements of mobile devices belonging to multiple New Jersey police officers whose families have already faced significant harassment and death threats.

Atlas said the investigator encountered Babel Street while testing hundreds of data broker tools and services to see if personal information on its users was being sold. They soon discovered Babel Street also bundles people-search services with its platform, to make it easier for customers to zero in on a specific device.

The investigator contacted Babel Street about possibly buying home addresses in certain areas of New Jersey. After listening to a sales pitch for Babel Street and expressing interest, the investigator was told Babel Street only offers their service to the government or to “contractors of the government.”

“The investigator (truthfully) mentioned that he was contemplating some government contract work in the future and was told by the Babel Street salesperson that ‘that’s good enough’ and that ‘they don’t actually check,’” Atlas shared in an email with reporters.

KrebsOnSecurity was one of five media outlets invited to review screen recordings that Atlas made while its investigator used a two-week trial version of Babel Street’s LocateX service. References and links to reporting by other publications, including 404 Media, Haaretz, NOTUS, and The New York Times, will appear throughout this story.

Collectively, these stories expose how the broad availability of mobile advertising data has created a market in which virtually anyone can build a sophisticated spying apparatus capable of tracking the daily movements of hundreds of millions of people globally.

The findings outlined in Atlas’s lawsuit against Babel Street also illustrate how mobile location data is set to massively complicate several hot-button issues, from the tracking of suspected illegal immigrants or women seeking abortions, to harassing public servants who are already in the crosshairs over baseless conspiracy theories and increasingly hostile political rhetoric against government employees.

WARRANTLESS SURVEILLANCE

Atlas says the Babel Street trial period allowed its investigator to find information about visitors to high-risk targets such as mosques, synagogues, courtrooms and abortion clinics. In one video, an Atlas investigator showed how they isolated mobile devices seen in a New Jersey courtroom parking lot that was reserved for jurors, and then tracked one likely juror’s phone to their home address over several days.

While the Atlas investigator had access to its trial account at Babel Street, they were able to successfully track devices belonging to several plaintiffs named or referenced in the lawsuit. They did so by drawing a digital polygon around the home address or workplace of each person in Babel Street’s platform, which focused exclusively on the devices that passed through those addresses each day.

One unique feature of Babel Street is the ability to toggle a “night” mode, which makes it relatively easy to determine within a few meters where a target typically lays their head each night (because their phone is usually not far away).

Atlas plaintiffs Scott and Justyna Maloney are both veteran officers with the Rahway, NJ police department who live together with their two young children. In April 2023, Scott and Justyna became the target of intense harassment and death threats after Officer Justyna responded to a routine call about a man filming people outside of the Motor Vehicle Commission in Rahway.

The man filming the Motor Vehicle Commission that day is a social media personality who often solicits police contact and then records himself arguing about constitutional rights with the responding officers.

Officer Justyna’s interaction with the man was entirely peaceful, and the episode appeared to end without incident. But after a selectively edited video of that encounter went viral, their home address and unpublished phone numbers were posted online. When their tormentors figured out that Scott was also a cop (a sergeant), the couple began receiving dozens of threatening text messages, including specific death threats.

According to the Atlas lawsuit, one of the messages to Mr. Maloney demanded money, and warned that his family would “pay in blood” if he didn’t comply. Sgt. Maloney said he then received a video in which a masked individual pointed a rifle at the camera and told him that his family was “going to get [their] heads cut off.”

Maloney said a few weeks later, one of their neighbors saw two suspicious individuals in ski masks parked one block away from the home and alerted police. Atlas’s complaint says video surveillance from neighboring homes shows the masked individuals circling the Maloney’s home. The responding officers arrested two men, who were armed, for unlawful possession of a firearm.

Atlas said their investigator was not able to conclusively find Scott Maloney’s iPhone in the Babel Street platform, but they did find Justyna’s. Babel Street had nearly 100,000 hits for her phone over several months, allowing Atlas to piece together an intimate picture of Justyna’s daily movements and meetings with others.

An Atlas investigator visited the Maloneys and inspected Justyna’s iPhone, and determined the only app that used her device’s location data was from the department store Macy’s.

In a written response to questions, Macy’s said its app includes an opt-in feature for geo-location, “which allows customers to receive an enhanced shopping experience based on their location.”

“We do not store any customer location information,” Macy’s wrote. “We share geo-location data with a limited number of partners who help us deliver this enhanced app experience. Furthermore, we have no connection with Babel Street” [link added for context].

Justyna’s experience highlights a stark reality about the broad availability of mobile location data: Even if the person you’re looking for isn’t directly identifiable in platforms like Babel Street, it is likely that at least some of that person’s family members are. In other words, it’s often trivial to infer the location of one device by successfully locating another.

The terms of service for Babel Street’s Locate X service state that the product “may not be used as the basis for any legal process in any country, including as the basis for a warrant, subpoena, or any other legal or administrative action.” But Scott Maloney said he’s convinced by their experience that not even law enforcement agencies should have access to this capability without a warrant.

“As a law enforcement officer, in order for me to track someone I need a judge to sign a warrant – and that’s for a criminal investigation after we’ve developed probable cause,” Mr. Maloney said in an interview. “Data brokers tracking me and my family just to sell that information for profit, without our consent, and even after we’ve explicitly asked them not to is deeply disturbing.”

Mr. Maloney’s law enforcement colleagues in other states may see things differently. In August, The Texas Observer reported that state police plan to spend more than $5 million on a contract for a controversial surveillance tool called Tangles from the tech firm PenLink. Tangles is an AI-based web platform that scrapes information from the open, deep and dark web, and it has a premier feature called WebLoc that can be used to geofence mobile devices.

The Associated Press reported last month that law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina have been using an obscure cell phone tracking tool called Fog Reveal — at times without warrants — that gives them the ability to follow people’s movements going back many months.

It remains unclear precisely how Babel Street is obtaining the abundance of mobile location data made available to users of its platform. The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

But according to a document (PDF) obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology directorate, Babel Street re-hosts data from the commercial phone tracking firm Venntel.

On Monday, the Substack newsletter All-Source Intelligence unearthed documents indicating that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has opened an inquiry into Venntel and its parent company Gravy Analytics.

“Venntel has also been a data partner of the police surveillance contractor Fog Data Science, whose product has been described as ‘mass surveillance on a budget,'” All-Source’s Jack Poulson wrote. “Venntel was also reported to have been a primary data source of the controversial ‘Locate X’ phone tracking product of the American data fusion company Babel Street.”

MAID IN HELL

The Mobile Advertising ID or MAID — the unique alphanumeric identifier assigned to each mobile device — was originally envisioned as a way to distinguish individual mobile customers without relying on personally identifiable information such as phone numbers or email addresses.

However, there is now a robust industry of marketing and advertising companies that specialize in assembling enormous lists of MAIDs that are “enriched” with historical and personal information about the individual behind each MAID.

Atlas said its investigator wanted to know whether they could find enriched MAID records on their New Jersey law enforcement customers, and soon found plenty of ad data brokers willing to sell it.

Some vendors offered only a handful of data fields, such as first and last name, MAID and email address. Other brokers sold far more detailed histories along with their MAID, including each subject’s social media profiles, precise GPS coordinates, and even likely consumer category.

How are advertisers and data brokers gaining access to so much information? Some sources of MAID data can be apps on your phone such as AccuWeather, GasBuddy, Grindr, and MyFitnessPal that collect your MAID and location and sell that to brokers.

A user’s MAID profile and location data also is commonly shared as a consequence of simply using a smartphone to visit a web page that features ads. In the few milliseconds before those ads load, the website will send a “bid request” to various ad exchanges, where advertisers can bid on the chance to place their ad in front of users who match the consumer profiles they’re seeking. A great deal of data can be included in a bid request, including the user’s precise location (the current open standard for bid requests is detailed here).

The trouble is that virtually anyone can access the “bidstream” data flowing through these so-called “realtime bidding” networks, because the information is simultaneously broadcast in the clear to hundreds of entities around the world.

The result is that there are a number of marketing companies that now enrich and broker access to this mobile location information. Earlier this year, the German news outlet netzpolitik.org purchased a bidstream data set containing more than 3.6 billion data points, and shared the information with the German daily BR24. They concluded that the data they obtained (through a free trial, no less) made it possible to establish movement profiles — some of them quite precise — of several million people across Germany.

Politico recently covered startling research from universities in New Hampshire, Kentucky and St. Louis that showed how the mobile advertising data they acquired allowed them to link visits from investigators with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to insiders selling stock before the investigations became public knowledge.

The researchers in that study said they didn’t attempt to use the same methods to track regulators from other agencies, but that virtually anyone could do it.

Justin Sherman, a distinguished fellow at Georgetown Law’s Center for Privacy and Technology, called the research a “shocking demonstration of what happens when companies can freely harvest Americans’ geolocation data and sell it for their chosen price.”

“Politicians should understand how they, their staff, and public servants are threatened by the sale of personal data—and constituent groups should realize that talk of data broker ‘controls’ or ‘best practices” is designed by companies to distract from the underlying problems and the comprehensive privacy and security solutions,” Sherman wrote for Lawfare this week.

A BIDSTREAM DRAGNET?

The Orwellian nature of modern mobile advertising networks may soon have far-reaching implications for women’s reproductive rights, as more states move to outlaw abortion within their borders. The 2022 Dobbs decision by the U.S. Supreme Court discarded the federal right to abortion, and 14 states have since enacted strict abortion bans.

Anti-abortion groups are already using mobile advertising data to advance their cause. In May 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported that an anti-abortion group in Wisconsin used precise geolocation data to direct ads to women it suspected of seeking abortions.

As it stands, there is little to stop anti-abortion groups from purchasing bidstream data (or renting access to a platform like Babel Street) and using it to geofence abortion clinics, potentially revealing all mobile devices transiting through these locations.

Atlas said its investigator geofenced an abortion clinic and was able to identify a likely employee at that clinic, following their daily route to and from that individual’s home address.

Last year, Idaho became the first state to outlaw “abortion trafficking,” which the Idaho Capital Sun reports is defined as “recruiting, harboring or transporting a pregnant minor to get an abortion or abortion medication without parental permission.” Tennessee now has a similar law, and GOP lawmakers in five other states introduced abortion trafficking bills that failed to advance this year, the Sun reports.

Atlas said its investigator used Babel Street to identify and track a person traveling from their home in Alabama — where abortion is now illegal — to an abortion clinic just over the border in Tallahassee, Fla. — and back home again within a few hours. Abortion rights advocates and providers are currently suing Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, seeking to block him from prosecuting people who help patients travel out-of-state to end pregnancies.

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit digital rights group, said she’s extremely concerned about dragnet surveillance of people crossing state lines in order to get abortions.

“Specifically, Republican officials from states that have outlawed abortion have made it clear that they are interested in targeting people who have gone to neighboring states in order to get abortions, and to make it more difficult for people who are seeking abortions to go to neighboring states,” Galperin said. “It’s not a great leap to imagine that states will do this.”

APPLES AND GOOGLES

Atlas found that for the right price (typically $10-50k a year), brokers can provide access to tens of billions of data points covering large swaths of the US population and the rest of the world.

Based on the data sets Atlas acquired — many of which included older MAID records — they estimate they could locate roughly 80 percent of Android-based devices, and about 25 percent of Apple phones. Google refers to its MAID as the “Android Advertising ID,” (AAID) while Apple calls it the “Identifier for Advertisers” (IDFA).

What accounts for the disparity between the number of Android and Apple devices that can be found in mobile advertising data? In April 2021, Apple shipped version 14.5 of its iOS operating system, which introduced a technology called App Tracking Transparency (ATT) that requires apps to get affirmative consent before they can track users by their IDFA or any other identifier.

Apple’s introduction of ATT had a swift and profound impact on the advertising market: Less than a year later Facebook disclosed that the iPhone privacy feature would decrease the company’s 2022 revenues by about $10 billion.

Google runs by far the world’s largest ad exchange, known as AdX. The U.S. Department of Justice, which has accused Google of building a monopoly over the technology that places ads on websites, estimates that Google’s ad exchange controls 47 percent of the U.S. market and 56 percent globally.

Google’s Android is also the dominant mobile operating system worldwide, with more than 72 percent of the market. In the U.S., however, iPhone users claim approximately 55 percent of the market, according to TechRepublic.

In response to requests for comment, Google said it does not send real time bidding requests to Babel Street, nor does it share precise location data in bid requests. The company added that its policies explicitly prohibit the sale of data from real-time bidding, or its use for any purpose other than advertising.

Google said its MAIDs are randomly generated and do not contain IP addresses, GPS coordinates, or any other location data, and that its ad systems do not share anyone’s precise location data.

“Android has clear controls for users to manage app access to device location, and reset or delete their advertising ID,” Google’s written statement reads. “If we learn that someone, whether an app developer, ad tech company or anyone else, is violating our policies, we take appropriate action. Beyond that, we support legislation and industry collaboration to address these types of data practices that negatively affect the entire mobile ecosystem, including all operating systems.”

In a written statement shared with reporters, Apple said Location Services is not on by default in its devices. Rather, users must enable Location Services and must give permission to each app or website to use location data. Users can turn Location Services off at any time, and can change whether apps have access to location at any time. The user’s choices include precise vs. approximate location, as well as a one-time grant of location access by the app.

“We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right, and build privacy protections into each of our products and services to put the user in control of their data,” an Apple spokesperson said. “We minimize personal data collection, and where possible, process data only on users’ devices.”

Zach Edwards is a senior threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm SilentPush who has studied the location data industry closely. Edwards said Google and Apple can’t keep pretending like the MAIDs being broadcast into the bidstream from hundreds of millions of American devices aren’t making most people trivially trackable.

“The privacy risks here will remain until Apple and Google permanently turn off their mobile advertising ID schemes and admit to the American public that this is the technology that has been supporting the global data broker ecosystem,” he said.

STATES ACT, WHILE CONGRESS DITHERS

According to Bloomberg Law, between 2019 and 2023, threats against federal judges have more than doubled. Amid increasingly hostile political rhetoric and conspiracy theories against government officials, a growing number of states are seeking to pass their own versions of Daniel’s Law.

Last month, a retired West Virginia police officer filed a class action lawsuit against the people-search service Whitepages for listing their personal information in violation of a statute the state passed in 2021 that largely mirrors Daniel’s Law.

In May 2024, Maryland passed the Judge Andrew F. Wilkinson Judicial Security Act — named after a county circuit court judge who was murdered by an individual involved in a divorce proceeding over which he was presiding. The law allows current and former members of the Maryland judiciary to request their personal information not be made available to the public.

Under the Maryland law, personal information can include a home address; telephone number, email address; Social Security number or federal tax ID number; bank account or payment card number; a license plate or other unique vehicle identifier; a birth or marital record; a child’s name, school, or daycare; place of worship; place of employment for a spouse, child, or dependent.

The law firm Troutman Pepper writes that “so far in 2024, 37 states have begun considering or have adopted similar privacy-based legislation designed to protect members of the judiciary and, in some states, other government officials involved in law enforcement.”

Atlas alleges that in response to requests to have data on its New Jersey law enforcement clients scrubbed from consumer records sold by LexisNexis, the data broker retaliated by freezing the credit of approximately 18,500 people, and falsely reporting them as identity theft victims.

In addition, Atlas said LexisNexis started returning failure codes indicating they had no record of these individuals, resulting in denials when officers attempted to refinance loans or open new bank accounts.

The data broker industry has responded by having at least 70 of the Atlas lawsuits moved to federal court, and challenging the constitutionality of the New Jersey statute as overly broad and a violation of the First Amendment.

Attorneys for the data broker industry argued in their motion to dismiss that there is “no First Amendment doctrine that exempts a content-based restriction from strict scrutiny just because it has some nexus with a privacy interest.”

Atlas’s lawyers responded that data covered under Daniel’s Law — personal information of New Jersey law enforcement officers — is not free speech. Atlas notes that while defending against comparable lawsuits, the data broker industry has argued that home address and phone number data are not “communications.”

“Data brokers should not be allowed to argue that information like addresses are not ‘communications’ in one context, only to turn around and claim that addresses are protectable communications,” Atlas argued (PDF). “Nor can their change of course alter the reality that the data at issue is not speech.”

The judge overseeing the challenge is expected to rule on the motion to dismiss within the next few weeks. Regardless of the outcome, the decision is likely to be appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, media law experts say they’re concerned that enacting Daniel’s Law in other states could limit the ability of journalists to hold public officials accountable, and allow authorities to pursue criminal charges against media outlets that publish the same type of public and government records that fuel the people-search industry.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said Congress’ failure to regulate data brokers, and the administration’s continued opposition to bipartisan legislation that would limit data sales to law enforcement, have created this current privacy crisis.

“Whether location data is being used to identify and expose closeted gay Americans, or to track people as they cross state lines to seek reproductive health care, data brokers are selling Americans’ deepest secrets and exposing them to serious harm, all for a few bucks,” Wyden said in a statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity, 404 Media, Haaretz, NOTUS, and The New York Times.

Sen. Wyden said Google also deserves blame for refusing to follow Apple’s lead by removing companies’ ability to track phones.

“Google’s insistence on uniquely tracking Android users – and allowing ad companies to do so as well – has created the technical foundations for the surveillance economy and the abuses stemming from it,” Wyden said.

Georgetown Law’s Justin Sherman said the data broker and mobile ad industries claim there are protections in place to anonymize mobile location data and restrict access to it, and that there are limits to the kinds of invasive inferences one can make from location data. The data broker industry also likes to tout the usefulness of mobile location data in fighting retail fraud, he said.

“All kinds of things can be inferred from this data, including people being targeted by abusers, or people with a particular health condition or religious belief,” Sherman said. “You can track jurors, law enforcement officers visiting the homes of suspects, or military intelligence people meeting with their contacts. The notion that the sale of all this data is preventing harm and fraud is hilarious in light of all the harm it causes enabling people to better target their cyber operations, or learning about people’s extramarital affairs and extorting public officials.”

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Privacy experts say disabling or deleting your device’s MAID will have no effect on how your phone operates, except that you may begin to see far less targeted ads on that device.

Any Android apps with permission to use your location should appear when you navigate to the Settings app, Location, and then App Permissions. “Allowed all the time” is the most permissive setting, followed by “Allowed only while in use,” “Ask every time,” and “Not allowed.”

Android users can delete their ad ID permanently, by opening the Settings app and navigating to Privacy > Ads. Tap “Delete advertising ID,” then tap it again on the next page to confirm. According to the EFF, this will prevent any app on your phone from accessing the ad ID in the future. Google’s documentation on this is here.

By default, Apple’s iOS requires apps to ask permission before they can access your device’s IDFA. When you install a new app, it may ask for permission to track you. When prompted to do so by an app, select the “Ask App Not to Track” option. Apple users also can set the “Allow apps to request to track” switch to the “off” position, which will block apps from asking to track you.

Apple also has its own targeted advertising system which is separate from third-party tracking enabled by the IDFA. To disable it, go to Settings, Privacy, and Apple Advertising, and ensure that the “Personalized Ads” setting is set to “off.”

Finally, if you’re the type of reader who’s the default IT support person for a small group of family or friends (bless your heart), it would be a good idea to set their devices not to track them, and to disable any apps that may have location data sharing turned on 24/7.

There is a dual benefit to this altruism, which is clearly in the device owner’s best interests. Because while your device may not be directly trackable via advertising data, making sure they’re opted out of said tracking also can reduce the likelihood that you are trackable simply by being physically close to those who are.

Brazil Arrests ‘USDoD,’ Hacker in FBI Infragard Breach

Brazilian authorities reportedly have arrested a 33-year-old man on suspicion of being “USDoD,” a prolific cybercriminal who rose to infamy in 2022 after infiltrating the FBI’s InfraGard program and leaking contact information for 80,000 members. More recently, USDoD was behind a breach at the consumer data broker National Public Data that led to the leak of Social Security numbers and other personal information for a significant portion of the U.S. population.

The Brazilian news outlet TV Globo first reported the news of USDoD’s arrest, saying the Federal Police arrested a 33-year-old man from Belo Horizonte. According to TV Globo, USDoD is wanted domestically in connection with the theft of data on Brazilian Federal Police officers.

USDoD was known to use the hacker handles “Equation Corp” and “NetSec,” and according to the cyber intelligence platform Intel 471 NetSec posted a thread on the now-defunct cybercrime community RaidForums on Feb. 22, 2022, in which they offered the email address and password for 659 members of the Brazilian Federal Police.

TV Globo didn’t name the man arrested, but the Portuguese tech news outlet Tecmundo published a report in August 2024 that named USDoD as 33-year-old Luan BG from Minas Gerais, Brazil. Techmundo said it learned the hacker’s real identity after being given a draft of a detailed, non-public report produced by the security firm CrowdStrike.

CrowdStrike did not respond to a request for comment. But a week after Techmundo’s piece, the tech news publication hackread.com published a story in which USDoD reportedly admitted that CrowdStrike was accurate in identifying him. Hackread said USDoD shared a statement, which was partially addressed to CrowdStrike:

In August 2024, a cybercriminal began selling Social Security numbers and other personal information stolen from National Public Data, a private data broker in Florida that collected and sold SSNs and contact data for a significant slice of the American population.

Additional reporting revealed National Public Data had inadvertently published its own passwords on the Internet. The company is now the target of multiple class-action lawsuits, and recently declared bankruptcy. In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, USDoD acknowledged stealing the NPD data earlier this year, but claimed he was not involved in leaking or selling it.

In December 2022, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that USDoD had social-engineered his way into the FBI’s InfraGard program, an FBI initiative designed to build informal information sharing partnerships with vetted professionals in the private sector concerning cyber and physical threats to critical U.S. national infrastructure.

USDoD applied for InfraGard membership using the identity of the CEO of a major U.S. financial company. Even though USDoD listed the real mobile phone number of the CEO, the FBI apparently never reached the CEO to validate his application, because the request was granted just a few weeks later. After that, USDoD said he used a simple program to collect all of the contact information shared by more than 80,000 InfraGard members.

The FBI declined to comment on reports about USDoD’s arrest.

In a lengthy September 2023 interview with databreaches.net, USDoD told the publication he was a man in his mid-30s who was born in South America and who holds dual citizenship in Brazil and Portugal. Toward the end of that interview, USDoD said they were planning to launch a platform for acquiring military intelligence from the United States.

Databreaches.net told KrebsOnSecurity USDoD has been a regular correspondent since that 2023 interview, and that after being doxed USDoD made inquiries with a local attorney to learn if there were any open investigations or charges against him.

“From what the lawyer found out from the federal police, they had no open cases or charges against him at that time,” Databreaches.net said. “From his writing to me and the conversations we had, my sense is he had absolutely no idea he was in imminent danger of being arrested.”

When KrebsOnSecurity last communicated with USDoD via Telegram on Aug. 15, 2024, they claimed they were “planning to retire and move on from this,” referring to multiple media reports that blamed USDoD for leaking nearly three billion consumer records from National Public Data.

Less than four days later, however, USDoD was back on his normal haunt at BreachForums, posting custom exploit code he claimed to have written to attack recently patched vulnerabilities in a popular theme made for WordPress websites.

Sudanese Brothers Arrested in ‘AnonSudan’ Takedown

The U.S. government on Wednesday announced the arrest and charging of two Sudanese brothers accused of running Anonymous Sudan (a.k.a. AnonSudan), a cybercrime business known for launching powerful distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against a range of targets, including dozens of hospitals, news websites and cloud providers. The younger brother is facing charges that could land him life in prison for allegedly seeking to kill people with his attacks.

Active since at least January 2023, AnonSudan has been described in media reports as a “hacktivist” group motivated by ideological causes. But in a criminal complaint, the FBI said those high-profile cyberattacks were effectively commercials for the hackers’ DDoS-for-hire service, which they sold to paying customers for as little as $150 a day — with up to 100 attacks allowed per day — or $700 for an entire week.

The complaint says despite reports suggesting Anonymous Sudan might be state-sponsored Russian actors pretending to be Sudanese hackers with Islamist motivations, AnonSudan was led by two brothers in Sudan — Ahmed Salah Yousif Omer, 22, and Alaa Salah Yusuuf Omer, 27.

AnonSudan claimed credit for successful DDoS attacks on numerous U.S. companies, causing a multi-day outage for Microsoft’s cloud services in June 2023. The group hit PayPal the following month, followed by Twitter/X (Aug. 2023), and OpenAI (Nov. 2023). An indictment in the Central District of California notes the duo even swamped the websites of the FBI and the Department of State.

Prosecutors say Anonymous Sudan offered a “Limited Internet Shutdown Package,” which would enable customers to shut down internet service providers in specified countries for $500 (USD) an hour. The two men also allegedly extorted some of their victims for money in exchange for calling off DDoS attacks.

The government isn’t saying where the Omer brothers are being held, only that they were arrested in March 2024 and have been in custody since. A statement by the U.S. Department of Justice says the government also seized control of AnonSudan’s DDoS infrastructure and servers after the two were arrested in March.

AnonSudan accepted orders over the instant messaging service Telegram, and marketed its DDoS service by several names, including “Skynet,” “InfraShutdown,” and the “Godzilla botnet.” However, the DDoS machine the Omer brothers allegedly built was not made up of hacked devices — as is typical with DDoS botnets.

Instead, the government alleges Skynet was more like a “distributed cloud attack tool,” with a command and control (C2) server, and an entire fleet of cloud-based servers that forwards C2 instructions to an array of open proxy resolvers run by unaffiliated third parties, which then transmit the DDoS attack data to the victims.

Amazon was among many companies credited with helping the government in the investigation, and said AnonSudan launched its attacks by finding hosting companies that would rent them small armies of servers.

“Where their potential impact becomes really significant is when they then acquire access to thousands of other machines — typically misconfigured web servers — through which almost anyone can funnel attack traffic,” Amazon explained in a blog post. “This extra layer of machines usually hides the true source of an attack from the targets.”

The security firm CrowdStrike said the success of AnonSudan’s DDoS attacks stemmed from a combination of factors, including sophisticated techniques for bypassing DDoS mitigation services. Also, AnonSudan typically launched so-called “Layer 7” attacks that sought to overwhelm targeted “API endpoints” — the back end systems responsible for handling website requests — with bogus requests for data, leaving the target unable to serve legitimate visitors.

The Omer brothers were both charged with one count of conspiracy to damage protected computers. The younger brother — Ahmed Salah — was also charged with three counts of damaging protected computers.

If extradited to the United States, tried and convicted in a court of law, the older brother Alaa Salah would be facing a maximum of five years in prison. But prosecutors say Ahmed Salah could face life in prison for allegedly launching attacks that sought to kill people.

As Hamas fighters broke through the border fence and attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, a wave of rockets was launched into Israel. At the same time, AnonSudan announced it was attacking the APIs that power Israel’s widely-used “red alert” mobile apps that warn residents about any incoming rocket attacks in their area.

In February 2024, AnonSudan launched a digital assault on the Cedars-Sinai Hospital in the Los Angeles area, an attack that caused emergency services and patients to be temporarily redirected to different hospitals.

The complaint alleges that in September 2023, AnonSudan began a week-long DDoS attack against the Internet infrastructure of Kenya, knocking offline government services, banks, universities and at least seven hospitals.

Lamborghini Carjackers Lured by $243M Cyberheist

The parents of a 19-year-old Connecticut honors student accused of taking part in a $243 million cryptocurrency heist in August were carjacked a week later — while out house-hunting in a brand new Lamborghini. Prosecutors say the couple was beaten and briefly kidnapped by six young men who traveled from Florida as part of a botched plan to hold the parents for ransom.

Late in the afternoon of Aug. 25, 2024 in Danbury, Ct., a married couple in their 50s pulled up to a gated community in a new Lamborghini Urus (investigators say the sports car still had temporary tags) when they were intentionally rear-ended by a Honda Civic.

A witness told police they saw three men exit a van that was following the Honda, and said the men began assaulting the couple and forcing them into the van. Local police officers spotted the van speeding from the scene and pursued it, only to find the vehicle crashed and abandoned a short distance away.

Inside the disabled van the police found the couple with their hands and feet bound in duct tape, the man visibly bruised after being assaulted with a baseball bat. Danbury police soon reported arresting six suspects in the kidnapping, all men aged 18-26 from Florida. They also recovered the abandoned Lamborghini from a wooded area.

A criminal complaint (PDF) filed on Sept. 24 against the six men does not name the victims, referring to them only as a married couple from Danbury with the initials R.C. and S.C. But prosecutors in Connecticut said they were targeted “because the co-conspirators believed the victims’ son had access to significant amounts of digital currency.”

What made the Miami men so convinced R.C. and S.C.’s son was loaded with cryptocurrency? Approximately one week earlier, on Aug. 19, a group of cybercriminals that allegedly included the couple’s son executed a sophisticated phone-based social engineering attack in which they stole $243 million worth of cryptocurrency from a victim in Washington, D.C.

That’s according to ZachXBT, a frequently cited crypto crime investigator who published a lengthy thread that broke down how the theft was carried out and ultimately exposed by the perpetrators themselves.

ZachXBT’s post included a screen recording of a Discord chat session made by one of the participants to the $243 million robbery, noting that two of the people involved managed to leak the username of the Microsoft Windows PCs they were using to participate in the chat.

One of the usernames leaked during the chat was Veer Chetal. According to ZachXBT, that name corresponds to a 19-year-old from Danbury who allegedly goes by the nickname “Wiz,” although in the leaked video footage he allegedly used the handle “Swag.”  Swag was reportedly involved in executing the early stages of the crypto heist — gaining access to the victim’s Gmail and iCloud accounts.

The same day ZachXBT published his findings, a criminal indictment was issued in Washington D.C. charging two of the men he named as involved in the heist. Prosecutors allege Malone “Greavys” Lam, 20, of Miami and Los Angeles, and Jeandiel “Box” Serrano, 21, of Los Angeles conspired to steal and launder over $230 million in cryptocurrency from a victim in Washington, D.C. The indictment alleges Lam and Serrano were helped by other unnamed co-conspirators.

“Lam and Serrano then allegedly spent the laundered cryptocurrency proceeds on international travel, nightclubs, luxury automobiles, watches, jewelry, designer handbags, and rental homes in Los Angeles and Miami,” reads a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice.

By tracing the flow of funds stolen in the heist, ZachXBT concluded that Wiz received a large percentage from the theft, noting that “additional comfort [in naming him as involved] was gained as throughout multiple recordings accomplices refer to him as ‘Veer’ on audio and in chats.”

“A cluster of [cryptocurrency] addresses tied to both Box/Wiz received $41M+ from two exchanges over the past few weeks primarily flowing to luxury goods brokers to purchase cars, watches, jewelry, and designer clothes,” ZachXBT wrote.

KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from Veer Chetal, and from his parents — Radhika Chetal and Suchil Chetal. This story will be updated in the event that anyone representing the Chetal family responds. Veer Chetal has not been publicly charged with any crime.

According to a news brief published by a private Catholic high school in Danbury that Veer Chetal attended, in 2022 he successfully completed Harvard’s Future Lawyers Program, a “unique pre-professional program where students, guided by qualified Harvard undergraduate instructors, learn how to read and build a case, how to write position papers, and how to navigate a path to law school.” A November 2022 story at patch.com quoted Veer Chetal (class of 2024) crediting the Harvard program with his decision to pursue a career in law.

It remains unclear which Chetal family member acquired the 2023 Lamborghini Urus, which has a starting price of around $233,000. Sushil Chetal’s LinkedIn profile says he is a vice president at the investment bank Morgan Stanley.

It is clear that other alleged co-conspirators to the $243 million heist displayed a conspicuous consumption of wealth following the date of the heist. ZachXBT’s post chronicled Malone’s flashy lifestyle, in which he allegedly used the stolen money to purchase more than 10 vehicles, rent palatial properties, travel with friends on chartered jets, and spend between $250,000 and $500,000 a night at clubs in Los Angeles and Miami.

WSVN-TV in Miami covered an FBI raid of a large rented waterfront home around the time Malone and Serrano were arrested. The news station interviewed a neighbor of the home’s occupants, who reported a recent large party at the residence wherein the street was lined with high-end luxury vehicles — all of them with temporary paper tags.

ZachXBT unearthed a video showing a person identified as Wiz at a Miami nightclub earlier this year, wherein they could be seen dancing to the crowd’s chants while holding an illuminated sign with the message, “I win it all.”

It appears that all of the suspects in the cyber heist (and at least some of the alleged carjackers) are members of The Com, an archipelago of crime-focused chat communities which collectively functions as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network that facilitates instant collaboration.

As documented in last month’s deep dive on top Com members,  The Com is also a place where cybercriminals go to boast about their exploits and standing within the community, or to knock others down a peg or two. Prominent Com members are endlessly sniping over who pulled off the most impressive heists, or who has accumulated the biggest pile of stolen virtual currencies.

And as often as they extort and rob victims for financial gain, members of The Com are trying to wrest stolen money from their cybercriminal rivals — often in ways that spill over into physical violence in the real world.

One of the six Miami-area men arrested in the carjacking and extortion plot gone awry — Reynaldo “Rey” Diaz — was shot twice while parked in his bright yellow Corvette in Miami’s design district in 2022. In an interview with a local NBC television station, Diaz said he was probably targeted for the jewelry he was wearing, which he described as “pretty expensive.”

KrebsOnSecurity has learned Diaz also went by the alias “Pantic” on Telegram chat channels dedicated to stealing cryptocurrencies. Pantic was known for participating in several much smaller cyber heists in the past, and spending most of his cut on designer clothes and jewelry.

Earlier this year, Diaz was “doxed,” or publicly outed as Pantic, with his personal and family information posted on a harassment and extortion channel frequented by members of The Com. The reason cited for Pantic’s doxing was widely corroborated by multiple Com members: Pantic had inexplicably robbed two close friends at gunpoint, one of whom recently died of a drug overdose.

Government prosecutors say the brazen daylight carjacking was paid for and organized by 23-year-old Miami resident Angel “Chi Chi” Borrero. In 2022, Borrero was arrested in Miami for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

The six Miami men face charges including first-degree assault, kidnapping and reckless endangerment, and five of them are being held on a $1 million bond. One suspect is also charged with reckless driving, engaging police in pursuit and evading responsibility; his bond was set at $2 million. Lam and Serrano are each charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to launder money.

Cybercriminals hail from all walks of life and income levels, but some of the more accomplished cryptocurrency thieves also tend to be among the more privileged, and from relatively well-off families. In other words, these individuals aren’t stealing to put food on the table: They’re doing it so they can amass all the trappings of instant wealth, and so they can boast about their crimes to others on The Com.

There is also a penchant among this crowd to call attention to their activities in conspicuous ways that hasten their arrest and criminal charging. In many ways, the story arc of the young men allegedly involved in the $243 million heist tracks closely to that of Joel Ortiz, a valedictorian who was sentenced in 2019 to 10 years in prison for stealing more than $5 million in cryptocurrencies.

Ortiz famously posted videos of himself and co-conspirators chartering flights and partying it up at LA nightclubs, with scantily clad women waving giant placards bearing their “OG” usernames — highly-prized, single-letter social media accounts that they’d stolen or purchased stolen from others.

Ortiz earned the distinction of being the first person convicted of SIM-swapping, a crime that involves using mobile phone company insiders or compromised employee accounts to transfer a target’s phone number to a mobile device controlled by the attackers. From there, the attacker can intercept any password reset links, and any one-time passcodes sent via SMS or automated voice calls.

But as the mobile carriers seek to make their networks less hospitable to SIM-swappers, and as more financial platforms seek to harden user account security, today’s crypto thieves are finding they don’t need SIM-swaps to steal obscene amounts of cryptocurrency. Not when tricking people over the phone remains such an effective approach.

According to ZachXBT, the crooks responsible for the $243 million theft initially compromised the target’s personal accounts after calling them as Google Support and using a spoofed number. The attackers also spoofed a call from account support representatives at the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini, claiming the target’s account had been hacked.

From there the target was social engineered over the phone into resetting multi-factor authentication and sending Gemini funds to a compromised wallet. ZachXBT says the attackers also convinced the victim to use AnyDesk to share their screen, and in doing so the victim leaked their private keys.

A Single Cloud Compromise Can Feed an Army of AI Sex Bots

Organizations that get relieved of credentials to their cloud environments can quickly find themselves part of a disturbing new trend: Cybercriminals using stolen cloud credentials to operate and resell sexualized AI-powered chat services. Researchers say these illicit chat bots, which use custom jailbreaks to bypass content filtering, often veer into darker role-playing scenarios, including child sexual exploitation and rape.

Researchers at security firm Permiso Security say attacks against generative artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure like Bedrock from Amazon Web Services (AWS) have increased markedly over the last six months, particularly when someone in the organization accidentally exposes their cloud credentials or key online, such as in a code repository like GitHub.

Investigating the abuse of AWS accounts for several organizations, Permiso found attackers had seized on stolen AWS credentials to interact with the large language models (LLMs) available on Bedrock. But they also soon discovered none of these AWS users had enabled full logging of LLM activity (by default, logs don’t include model prompts and outputs), and thus they lacked any visibility into what attackers were doing with that access.

So Permiso researchers decided to leak their own test AWS key on GitHub, while turning on logging so that they could see exactly what an attacker might ask for, and what the responses might be.

Within minutes, their bait key was scooped up and used in a service that offers AI-powered sex chats online.

“After reviewing the prompts and responses it became clear that the attacker was hosting an AI roleplaying service that leverages common jailbreak techniques to get the models to accept and respond with content that would normally be blocked,” Permiso researchers wrote in a report released today.

“Almost all of the roleplaying was of a sexual nature, with some of the content straying into darker topics such as child sexual abuse,” they continued. “Over the course of two days we saw over 75,000 successful model invocations, almost all of a sexual nature.”

Ian Ahl, senior vice president of threat research at Permiso, said attackers in possession of a working cloud account traditionally have used that access for run-of-the-mill financial cybercrime, such as cryptocurrency mining or spam. But over the past six months, Ahl said, Bedrock has emerged as one of the top targeted cloud services.

“Bad guy hosts a chat service, and subscribers pay them money,” Ahl said of the business model for commandeering Bedrock access to power sex chat bots. “They don’t want to pay for all the prompting that their subscribers are doing, so instead they hijack someone else’s infrastructure.”

Ahl said much of the AI-powered chat conversations initiated by the users of their honeypot AWS key were harmless roleplaying of sexual behavior.

“But a percentage of it is also geared toward very illegal stuff, like child sexual assault fantasies and rapes being played out,” Ahl said. “And these are typically things the large language models won’t be able to talk about.”

AWS’s Bedrock uses large language models from Anthropic, which incorporates a number of technical restrictions aimed at placing certain ethical guardrails on the use of their LLMs. But attackers can evade or “jailbreak” their way out of these restricted settings, usually by asking the AI to imagine itself in an elaborate hypothetical situation under which its normal restrictions might be relaxed or discarded altogether.

“A typical jailbreak will pose a very specific scenario, like you’re a writer who’s doing research for a book, and everyone involved is a consenting adult, even though they often end up chatting about nonconsensual things,” Ahl said.

In June 2024, security experts at Sysdig documented a new attack that leveraged stolen cloud credentials to target ten cloud-hosted LLMs. The attackers Sysdig wrote about gathered cloud credentials through a known security vulnerability, but the researchers also found the attackers sold LLM access to other cybercriminals while sticking the cloud account owner with an astronomical bill.

“Once initial access was obtained, they exfiltrated cloud credentials and gained access to the cloud environment, where they attempted to access local LLM models hosted by cloud providers: in this instance, a local Claude (v2/v3) LLM model from Anthropic was targeted,” Sysdig researchers wrote. “If undiscovered, this type of attack could result in over $46,000 of LLM consumption costs per day for the victim.”

Ahl said it’s not certain who is responsible for operating and selling these sex chat services, but Permiso suspects the activity may be tied to a platform cheekily named “chub[.]ai,” which offers a broad selection of pre-made AI characters with whom users can strike up a conversation. Permiso said almost every character name from the prompts they captured in their honeypot could be found at Chub.

Chub offers free registration, via its website or a mobile app. But after a few minutes of chatting with their newfound AI friends, users are asked to purchase a subscription. The site’s homepage features a banner at the top that reads: “Banned from OpenAI? Get unmetered access to uncensored alternatives for as little as $5 a month.”

Until late last week Chub offered a wide selection of characters in a category called “NSFL” or Not Safe for Life, a term meant to describe content that is disturbing or nauseating to the point of being emotionally scarring.

Fortune profiled Chub AI in a January 2024 story that described the service as a virtual brothel advertised by illustrated girls in spaghetti strap dresses who promise a chat-based “world without feminism,” where “girls offer sexual services.” From that piece:

Chub AI offers more than 500 such scenarios, and a growing number of other sites are enabling similar AI-powered child pornographic role-play. They are part of a broader uncensored AI economy that, according to Fortune’s interviews with 18 AI developers and founders, was spurred first by OpenAI and then accelerated by Meta’s release of its open-source Llama tool.

Fortune says Chub is run by someone using the handle “Lore,” who said they launched the service to help others evade content restrictions on AI platforms. Chub charges fees starting at $5 a month to use the new chatbots, and the founder told Fortune the site had generated more than $1 million in annualized revenue.

KrebsOnSecurity sought comment about Permiso’s research from AWS, which initially seemed to downplay the seriousness of the researchers’ findings. The company noted that AWS employs automated systems that will alert customers if their credentials or keys are found exposed online.

AWS explained that when a key or credential pair is flagged as exposed, it is then restricted to limit the amount of abuse that attackers can potentially commit with that access. For example, flagged credentials can’t be used to create or modify authorized accounts, or spin up new cloud resources.

Ahl said Permiso did indeed receive multiple alerts from AWS about their exposed key, including one that warned their account may have been used by an unauthorized party. But they said the restrictions AWS placed on the exposed key did nothing to stop the attackers from using it to abuse Bedrock services.

Sometime in the past few days, however, AWS responded by including Bedrock in the list of services that will be quarantined in the event an AWS key or credential pair is found compromised or exposed online. AWS confirmed that Bedrock was a new addition to its quarantine procedures.

Additionally, not long after KrebsOnSecurity began reporting this story, Chub’s website removed its NSFL section. It also appears to have removed cached copies of the site from the Wayback Machine at archive.org. Still, Permiso found that Chub’s user stats page shows the site has more than 3,000 AI conversation bots with the NSFL tag, and that 2,113 accounts were following the NSFL tag.

Permiso said their entire two-day experiment generated a $3,500 bill from AWS. Most of that cost was tied to the 75,000 LLM invocations caused by the sex chat service that hijacked their key.

Paradoxically, Permiso found that while enabling these logs is the only way to know for sure how crooks might be using a stolen key, the cybercriminals who are reselling stolen or exposed AWS credentials for sex chats have started including programmatic checks in their code to ensure they aren’t using AWS keys that have prompt logging enabled.

“Enabling logging is actually a deterrent to these attackers because they are immediately checking to see if you have logging on,” Ahl said. “At least some of these guys will totally ignore those accounts, because they don’t want anyone to see what they’re doing.”

In a statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity, AWS said its services are operating securely, as designed, and that no customer action is needed. Here is their statement:

“AWS services are operating securely, as designed, and no customer action is needed. The researchers devised a testing scenario that deliberately disregarded security best practices to test what may happen in a very specific scenario. No customers were put at risk. To carry out this research, security researchers ignored fundamental security best practices and publicly shared an access key on the internet to observe what would happen.”

“AWS, nonetheless, quickly and automatically identified the exposure and notified the researchers, who opted not to take action. We then identified suspected compromised activity and took additional action to further restrict the account, which stopped this abuse. We recommend customers follow security best practices, such as protecting their access keys and avoiding the use of long-term keys to the extent possible. We thank Permiso Security for engaging AWS Security.”

AWS said customers can configure model invocation logging to collect Bedrock invocation logs, model input data, and model output data for all invocations in the AWS account used in Amazon Bedrock. Customers can also use CloudTrail to monitor Amazon Bedrock API calls.

The company said AWS customers also can use services such as GuardDuty to detect potential security concerns and Billing Alarms to provide notifications of abnormal billing activity. Finally, AWS Cost Explorer is intended to give customers a way to visualize and manage Bedrock costs and usage over time.

Anthropic told KrebsOnSecurity it is always working on novel techniques to make its models more resistant to jailbreaks.

“We remain committed to implementing strict policies and advanced techniques to protect users, as well as publishing our own research so that other AI developers can learn from it,” Anthropic said in an emailed statement. “We appreciate the research community’s efforts in highlighting potential vulnerabilities.”

Anthropic said it uses feedback from child safety experts at Thorn around signals often seen in child grooming to update its classifiers, enhance its usage policies, fine tune its models, and incorporate those signals into testing of future models.

Update: 5:01 p.m. ET: Chub has issued a statement saying they are only hosting the role-playing characters, and that the LLMs they use run on their own infrastructure.

“Our own LLMs run on our own infrastructure,” Chub wrote in an emailed statement. “Any individuals participating in such attacks can use any number of UIs that allow user-supplied keys to connect to third-party APIs. We do not participate in, enable or condone any illegal activity whatsoever.”

Crooked Cops, Stolen Laptops & the Ghost of UGNazi

A California man accused of failing to pay taxes on tens of millions of dollars allegedly earned from cybercrime also paid local police officers hundreds of thousands of dollars to help him extort, intimidate and silence rivals and former business partners, the government alleges. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that many of the man’s alleged targets were members of UGNazi, a hacker group behind multiple high-profile breaches and cyberattacks back in 2012.

A federal complaint (PDF) filed last week said the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been investigating Los Angeles resident Adam Iza. Also known as “Assad Faiq” and “The Godfather,” Iza is the founder of a cryptocurrency investment platform called Zort that advertised the ability to make smart trades based on artificial intelligence technology.

But the feds say investors in Zort soon lost their shorts, after Iza and his girlfriend began spending those investments on Lamborghinis, expensive jewelry, vacations, a $28 million home in Bel Air, even cosmetic surgery to extend the length of his legs.

The complaint states the FBI started looking at Iza after receiving multiple reports that he had on his payroll several active deputies with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (LASD). Iza’s attorney did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The complaint cites a letter from an attorney for a victim referenced only as “E.Z.,” who was seeking help related to an extortion and robbery allegedly committed by Iza. The government says that in March 2022, three men showed up at E.Z.’s home, and tried to steal his laptop in an effort to gain access to E.Z. cryptocurrency holdings online. A police report referenced in the complaint says three intruders were scared off when E.Z. fired several handgun rounds in the direction of his assailants.

The FBI later obtained a copy of a search warrant executed by LASD deputies in January 2022 for GPS location information on a phone belonging to E.Z., which shows an LASD deputy unlawfully added E.Z.’s mobile number to a list of those associated with an unrelated firearms investigation.

“Damn my guy actually filed the warrant,” Iza allegedly texted someone after the location warrant was entered. “That’s some serious shit to do for someone….risking a 24 years career. I pay him 280k a month for complete resources. They’re active-duty.”

The FBI alleges LASD officers had on several previous occasions tried to kidnap and extort E.Z. at Iza’s behest. The complaint references a November 2021 incident wherein Iza and E.Z. were in a car together when Iza asked to stop and get snacks at a convenience store. While they were still standing next to the car, a van with several armed LASD deputies showed up and tried to force E.Z. to hand over his phone. E.Z. escaped unharmed, and alerted 911.

E.Z. appears to be short for Enzo Zelocchi, a self-described “actor” who was featured in an ABC News story about a home invasion in Los Angeles around that same time as the March 2022 home invasion, in which Zelocchi is quoted as saying at least two men tried to rob him at gunpoint (we’ll revisit Zelocchi’s acting credits in a moment).

The criminal complaint makes frequent references to a co-conspirator of Iza (“CC-1”) — his girlfriend at the time — who allegedly helped Iza run his businesses and spend the millions plunked down by Zort investors. We know what E.Z. stands for because Iza’s girlfriend then was a woman named Iris Au, and in November 2022 she sued Zelocchi for allegedly stealing Iza’s laptop.

The complaint says Iza also harassed a man identified only as T.W., and refers to T.W. as one of two Americans currently incarcerated in the Philippines for murder. In December 2018, a then 21-year-old Troy Woody Jr. was arrested in Manila after he was spotted dumping the body of his dead girlfriend Tomi Masters into a local river.

Woody is accused of murdering Masters with the help of his best friend and roommate at the time: Mir Islam, a.k.a. “JoshTheGod,” referred to in the Iza complaint as “M.I.” Islam and Woody were both core members of UGNazi, a hacker collective that sprang up in 2012 and claimed credit for hacking and attacking a number of high-profile websites.

In June 2016, Islam was sentenced to a year in prison for an impressive array of crimes, including stalking people online and posting their personal data on the Internet. Islam also pleaded guilty to reporting dozens of phony bomb threats and fake hostage situations at the homes of celebrities and public officials (Islam participated in a swatting attack against this author in 2013).

In December 2022, Troy Woody Jr. sued Iza, Zelocchi and Zort, alleging (PDF) Iza and Zelocchi were involved in a 2018 home invasion at his residence, wherein Woody claimed his assailants stole laptops and phones containing more than $200 million in cryptocurrencies.

Woody’s complaint states that Masters also was present during his 2018 home invasion, as was another core UGNazi member: Eric “CosmoTheGod” Taylor. CosmoTheGod rocketed to Internet infamy in 2013 when he and a number of other hackers set up the Web site exposed[dot]su, which published the address, Social Security numbers and other personal information of public figures, including the former First Lady Michelle Obama, the then-director of the FBI and the U.S. attorney general. The group also swatted many of the people they doxed.

In 2017, Taylor was sentenced to three years probation for participating in multiple swatting attacks, including the one against my home in 2013.

The complaint against Iza says the FBI interviewed Woody in Manila where he is currently incarcerated, and learned that Iza has been harassing him about passwords that would unlock access to cryptocurrencies. The FBI’s complaint leaves open the question of how Woody and Islam got the phones in the first place, but the implication is that Iza may have instigated the harassment by having mobile phones smuggled to the prisoners.

The government suggests its case against Iza was made possible in part thanks to Iza’s propensity for ripping off people who worked for him. The complaint cites information provided by a private investigator identified only as “K.C.,” who said Iza hired him to surveil Zelocchi but ultimately refused to pay him for much of the work.

K.C. stands for Kenneth Childs, who in 2022 sued Iris Au and Zort (PDF) for theft by deception and commercial disparagement, after it became clear his private eye services were being used as part of a scheme by the Zort founders to intimidate and extort others. Childs’ complaint says Iza clawed back tens of thousands of dollars in payments he’d previously made as part of their contract.

The government also included evidence provided by an associate of Iza’s — named only as “R.C.” — who was hired to throw a party at Iza’s home. According to the feds, Iza paid the associate $50,000 to craft the event to his liking, but on the day of the party Iza allegedly told R.C. he was unhappy with the event and demanded half of his money back.

When R.C. balked, Iza allegedly surrounded the man with armed LASD officers, who then extracted the payment by seizing his phone. The government says Iza kept R.C.’s phone and spent the remainder of his bank balance.

The FBI said that after the incident at the party, Iza had his bribed sheriff deputies pull R.C. over and arrest him on phony drug charges. The complaint includes a photo of R.C. being handcuffed by the police, which the feds say Iza sent to R.C. in order to intimidate him even further. The drug charges were later dismissed for lack of evidence.

The government alleges Iza and Au paid the LASD officers using Zelle transfers from accounts tied to two different entities incorporated by one or both of them: Dream Agency and Rise Agency. The complaint further alleges that these two entities were the beneficiaries of a business that sold hacked and phished Facebook advertising accounts, and bribed Facebook employees to unblock ads that violated its terms of service.

The complaint says Iza ran this business with another individual identified only as “T.H.,” and that at some point T.H. had personal problems and checked himself into rehab. T.H. told the FBI that Iza responded by stealing his laptop and turning him in to the government.

KrebsOnSecurity has learned that T.H. in this case is Tassilo Heinrich, a man indicted in 2022 for hacking into the e-commerce platform Shopify, and leaking the user database for Ledger, a company that makes hardware wallets for storing cryptocurrencies.

Heinrich pleaded guilty and was sentenced to time served, three years of supervised release, and ordered to pay restitution to Shopify. Upon his release from custody, Heinrich told the FBI that Iza was still using his account at the public screenshot service Gyazo to document communications regarding his alleged bribing of LASD officers.

Prosecutors say Iza and Au portrayed themselves as glamorous and wealthy individuals who were successful social media influencers, but that most of that was a carefully crafted facade designed to attract investment from cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Meanwhile, the U.K. tabloids reported this summer that Au was dating Davide Sanclimenti, the 2022 co-winner on the dating reality show Love Island.

Recall that we promised to revisit Mr. Zelocchi’s claimed acting credits. Despite being briefly listed on the Internet Movie Data Base (imdb.com) as the most awarded science fiction actor of all time, it’s not clear whether Mr. Zelocchi has starred in any real movies.

Earlier this year, an Internet sleuth on Youtube showed that even though Zelocchi’s IMDB profile has him earning more awards than most other actors on the platform (here he is holding a Youtube top viewership award), Zelocchi is probably better known as the director of the movie once rated the absolute worst sci-fi flick on IMDB: A 2015 work called “Angel’s Apocalypse.” Most of the videos on Zelocchi’s Instagram page appear to be brief clips, some of which look more like a commercial for men’s cologne than scenes from a real movie.

In many ways, the crimes described in this complaint and the various related civil lawsuits would prefigure a disturbing new trend within English-speaking cybercrime communities that has bubbled up in the past few years: The emergence of “violence-as-as-service” offerings that allow cybercriminals to anonymously extort and intimidate their rivals.

Found on certain Telegram channels are solicitations for IRL or “In Real Life” jobs, wherein people hire themselves out as willing to commit a variety of physical attacks in their local geographic area, such as slashing tires, firebombing a home, or tossing a brick through someone’s window.

Many of the cybercriminals in this community have stolen tens of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency, and can easily afford to bribe police officers. KrebsOnSecurity would expect to see more of this in the future as young, crypto-rich cybercriminals seek to corrupt people in authority to their advantage.

U.S. Indicts 2 Top Russian Hackers, Sanctions Cryptex

The United States today unveiled sanctions and indictments against the alleged proprietor of Joker’s Stash, a now-defunct cybercrime store that peddled tens of millions of payment cards stolen in some of the largest data breaches of the past decade. The government also indicted and sanctioned a top Russian cybercriminal known as Taleon, whose cryptocurrency exchange Cryptex has evolved into one of Russia’s most active money laundering networks.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) today unsealed an indictment against a 38-year-old man from Novosibirsk, Russia for allegedly operating Joker’s Stash, an extremely successful carding shop that came online in late 2014. Joker’s sold cards stolen in a steady drip of breaches at U.S. retailers, including Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord and Taylor, Bebe Stores, Hilton Hotels, Jason’s Deli, Whole Foods, Chipotle, Wawa, Sonic Drive-In, the Hy-Vee supermarket chain, Buca Di Beppo, and Dickey’s BBQ.

The government believes the brains behind Joker’s Stash is Timur Kamilevich Shakhmametov, an individual who is listed in Russian incorporation documents as the owner of Arpa Plus, a Novosibirsk company that makes mobile games.

Early in his career (circa 2000) Shakhmametov was known as “v1pee” and was the founder of the Russian hacker group nerf[.]ru, which periodically published hacking tools and exploits for software vulnerabilities.

By 2004, v1pee had adopted the moniker “Vega” on the exclusive Russian language hacking forum Mazafaka, where this user became one of the more reliable vendors of stolen payment cards.

In the years that followed, Vega would cement his reputation as a top carder on other forums, including Verified, DirectConnection, and Carder[.]pro.

Vega also became known as someone who had the inside track on “unlimited cashouts,” a globally coordinated cybercrime scheme in which crooks hack a bank or payment card processor and use cloned cards at cash machines to rapidly withdraw millions of dollars in just a few hours.

“Hi, there is work on d+p, unlimited,” Vega wrote in a private message to another user on Verified in Dec. 2012, referring to “dumps and PINs,” the slang term for stolen debit cards with the corresponding PINs that would allow ATM withdrawals.

Joker’s Stash came online in the wake of several enormous card breaches at retailers like Target and Home Depot, and the resulting glut of inventory had depressed prices for stolen cards. But Joker’s would distinguish itself by catering to high-roller customers — essentially street gangs in the United States that would purchase thousands of stolen payment cards in one go.

Faced with a buyer’s market, Joker’s Stash set themselves apart by focusing on loyalty programs, frequent buyer discounts, money-back guarantees, and just plain good customer service. Big spenders were given access to the most freshly hacked payment cards, and were offered the ability to get free replacement cards if any turned out to be duds.

Joker’s Stash also was unique because it claimed to sell only payment cards that its own hackers had stolen directly from merchants. At the time, card shops typically resold payment cards that were stolen and supplied by many third-party hackers of unknown reliability or reputation.

In January 2021, Joker’s Stash announced it was closing up shop, after European authorities seized a number of servers for the fraud store, and its proprietor came down with the Coronavirus.

A DOJ statement credits the U.S. Secret Service for leading the years-long investigations (the Service’s original mandate was not protecting the president; it was pursuing counterfeiters, and modern-day carders definitely qualify as that). Prosecutors allege Joker’s Stash earned revenues of at least $280 million, but possibly more than $1 billion (the broad range is a consequence of several variables, including the rapid fluctuation in the price of bitcoin and the stolen goods they were peddling).

TALEON

The proprietors of Joker’s Stash may have sold tens of millions of stolen payment cards, but Taleon is by far the bigger fish in this law enforcement action because his various cryptocurrency and cash exchanges have allegedly helped to move billions of dollars into and out of Russia over the past 20 years.

An indictment unsealed today names Taleon as Sergey Sergeevich Ivanov, 44, of Saint Petersburg, Russia. The government says Ivanov, who likely changed his surname from Omelnitskii at some point, laundered money for Joker’s Stash, among many other cybercrime stores.

In a statement today, the Treasury Department said Ivanov has laundered hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of virtual currency for ransomware actors, initial access brokers, darknet marketplace vendors, and other criminal actors for approximately the last 20 years.

First appearing on Mazafaka in the early 2000s, Taleon was known on the forums as someone who could reliably move large amounts of physical cash. Sources familiar with the investigation said Taleon’s service emerged as one of the few remaining domestic cash delivery services still operating after Russia invaded Ukraine in Feb. 2022.

Taleon set up his service to facilitate transfers between Moscow, St. Petersburg and financial institutions in the West. Taleon’s private messages on some hacker forums have been leaked over the years and indexed by the cyber intelligence platform Intel 471. Those messages indicate Taleon worked on many of the same ATM cashouts as Vegas, so it’s clear the two had an established business relationship well before Joker’s Stash came into being.

Sometime around 2013, Taleon launched a partnership with a money transfer business called pm2btc[.]me. PM2BTC allowed customers to convert funds from the virtual currency Perfect Money (PM) into bitcoin, and then have the balance (minus a processing fee) available on a physical debit card that could be used at ATMs, for shopping online, or at retail stores.

The U.S. government itself set things in motion for Taleon’s nascent cryptocurrency exchange business in 2013 after the DOJ levied money laundering charges against the proprietors of Liberty Reserve, one of the largest virtual currencies in operation at the time.  Liberty Reserve was heavily used by cybercriminals of all stripes. The government said the service had more than a million users worldwide, and laundered in excess of $6 billion in suspected criminal proceeds.

In the days following the takedown of Liberty Reserve, KrebsOnSecurity ran a story that examined discussions across multiple top Russian cybercrime forums about where crooks could feel safe parking their stolen funds. The answer involved Bitcoin, but also Taleon’s new service.

UAPS

Part of the appeal of Taleon’s exchange was that it gave its vetted customers an “application programming interface” or API that made it simple for dodgy online shops selling stolen goods and cybercrime services to accept cryptocurrency deposits from their customers, and to manage payouts to any suppliers and affiliates.

This API is synonymous with a service Taleon and friends operate in the background called UAPS, short for “Universal Anonymous Payment System.” UAPS has gone by several other names including “Pinpays,” and in October 2014 it landed Joker’s Stash as its first big client.

A source with knowledge of the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity that Taleon is a pilot who owns and flies around in his own helicopter.

Ivanov appears to have little to no social media presence, but the 40-year-old woman he lives with in St. Petersburg does, and she has a photo on her Vktontake page that shows the two of them in 2019 flying over Lake Ladoga, a large body of water directly north of St. Petersburg.

BRIANS CLUB

In late 2015, a major competitor to Joker’s Stash emerged using UAPS for its back-end payments: BriansClub. BriansClub sullies this author’s name, photos and reputation to peddle millions of credit and debit cards stolen from merchants in the United States and around the world.

In 2019, someone hacked BriansClub and relieved the fraud shop of more than 26 million stolen payment cards — an estimated one-third of the 87 million payment card accounts that were on sale across all underground shops at that time. An anonymous source shared that card data with KrebsOnSecurity, which ultimately shared it with a consortium of financial institutions that issued most of the cards.

After that incident, the administrator of BriansClub changed the site’s login page so that it featured a copy of my phone bill, Social Security card, and a link to my full credit report [to this day, random cybercriminals confuse Yours Truly with the proprietor of BriansClub].

Alex Holden is founder of the Milwaukee-based cybersecurity firm Hold Security. Holden has long maintained visibility into cryptocurrency transactions made by BriansClub.

Holden said those records show BriansClub sells tens of thousands of dollars worth of stolen credit cards every day, and that in the last two years alone the BriansClub administrator has removed more than $242 million worth of cryptocurrency revenue from the UAPS platform.

Passive domain name system (DNS) records show that in its early days BriansClub shared a server in Lithuania along with just a handful of other domains, including secure.pinpays[.]com, the crime forum Verified, and a slew of carding shops operating under the banner Rescator.

As KrebsOnSecurity detailed in December 2023, the Rescator shops were directly involved in some of the largest payment card breaches of the past decade. Those include the 2013 breach at Target and the 2014 breach at Home Depot, intrusions that exposed more than 100 million payment card records.

CRYPTEX

In early 2018, Taleon and the proprietors of UAPS launched a cryptocurrency exchange called Cryptex[.]net that has emerged as a major mover of ill-gotten crypto coins.

Cryptex has been associated with quite a few ransomware transactions, including the largest known ransomware payment to date. In February 2024, a Fortune 50 ransomware victim paid a record $75 million ransom to a Russian cybercrime group that calls themselves the Dark Angels. A source with knowledge of the investigation said an analysis of that payment shows roughly half of it was processed through Cryptex.

That source provided a screen shot of Cryptex’s sending and receiving exposure as viewed by Chainalysis, a company the U.S. government and many cryptocurrency exchanges rely on to flag transactions associated with suspected money laundering, ransomware payouts, or facilitating payments for darknet websites.

Chainalysis finds that Cryptex has received more than $1.6 billion since its inception, and that this amount is roughly equal to its sending exposure (although the total number of outflows is nearly half of the inflows).

The graphic indicates a great deal of money flowing into Cryptex — roughly a quarter of it — is coming from bitcoin ATMs around the world. Experts say most of those ATM inflows to Cryptex are bitcoin ATM cash deposits from customers of carding websites like BriansClub and Jokers Stash.

The indictments released today do not definitively connect Taleon to Cryptex. However, PM2BTC (which teamed up with Taleon to launch UAPS and Pinpays) and Cryptex have now been sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) levied sanctions today against PM2BTC under a powerful new “Section 9714” authority included in the Combating Russian Money Laundering Act, changes enacted in 2022 to make it easier to target financial entities involved in laundering money for Russia.

Treasury first used this authority last year against Bitzlato, a cryptocurrency exchange operating in Russia that became a money laundering conduit for ransomware attackers and dark market dealers.

THE LAUNDROMAT

An investigation into the corporate entities behind UAPS and Cryptex reveals an organization incorporated in 2012 in Scotland called Orbest Investments LP. Records from the United Kingdom’s business registry show the owners of Orbest Investments are two entities: CS Proxy Solutions CY, and RM Everton Ltd.

Public business records further reveal that CS Proxy Solutions and RM Everton are co-owners of Progate Solutions, a holding company that featured prominently in a June 2017 report from Bellingcat and Transparency International (PDF) on money laundering networks tied to the Kremlin.

“Law enforcement agencies believe that the total amount laundered through this process could be as high as US$80 billion,” the joint report reads. “Although it is not clear where all of this money came from, investigators claim it includes significant amounts of money that were diverted from the Russian treasury and state contracts.”

Their story built on reporting published earlier that year by the Organized Crime and Corruption Project (OCCRP) and Novaya Gazeta, which found that at least US$20.8 billion was secretly moved out of Russia between 2010 and 2014 through a vast money laundering machine comprising over 5,000 legal entities known as “The Laundromat.”

“Using company records, reporters tracked the names of some clients after executives refused to give them out,” the OCCRP report explains. “They found the heavy users of the scheme were rich and powerful Russians who had made their fortunes from dealing with the Russian state.”

Rich Sanders is a blockchain analyst and investigator who advises the law enforcement and intelligence community. Sanders just returned from a three-week sojourn through Ukraine, traveling with Ukrainian soldiers while mapping out dodgy Russian crypto exchanges that are laundering money for narcotics networks operating in the region. Sanders said today’s sanctions by the Treasury Department will likely have an immediate impact on Cryptex and its customers.

“Whenever an entity is sanctioned, the implications on-chain are immense,” Sanders told KrebsOnSecurity. “Regardless of whether an exchange is actually compliant or just virtue signals it, it is the case across the board that exchanges will pay attention to these sanctions.”

“This action shows these payment processors for illicit platforms will get attention eventually,” Sanders continued. “Even if it took way too long in this case, Cryptex knew the majority of their volume was problematic, knew why it was problematic, and did it anyway. And this should be a wake up call for other exchanges that know full well that most of their volume is problematic.”

The U.S. Department of State is offering a reward of up to $10 million each for information leading to the arrests and/or convictions of Shakhmametov and Ivanov. The State announcement says separate rewards of up to $1 million each are being offered for information leading to the identification of other leaders of the Joker’s Stash criminal marketplace (other than Shakhmametov), as well as the identification of other key leaders of the UAPS, PM2BTC, and PinPays transnational criminal groups (other than Ivanov).

Timeshare Owner? The Mexican Drug Cartels Want You

The FBI is warning timeshare owners to be wary of a prevalent telemarketing scam involving a violent Mexican drug cartel that tries to trick people into believing someone wants to buy their property. This is the story of a couple who recently lost more than $50,000 to an ongoing timeshare scam that spans at least two dozen phony escrow, title and realty firms.

One evening in late 2022, someone phoned Mr. & Mrs. Dimitruk, a retired couple from Ontario, Canada and asked whether they’d ever considered selling their timeshare in Florida. The person on the phone referenced their timeshare address and said they had an interested buyer in Mexico. Would they possibly be interested in selling it?

The Dimitruks had purchased the timeshare years ago, but it wasn’t fully paid off — they still owed roughly $5,000 before they could legally sell it. That wouldn’t be an issue for this buyer, the man on the phone assured them.

With a few days, their contact at an escrow company in New York called ecurrencyescrow[.]llc faxed them forms to fill out and send back to start the process of selling their timeshare to the potential buyer, who had offered an amount that was above what the property was likely worth.

After certain forms were signed and faxed, the Dimitruks were asked to send a small wire transfer of more than $3,000 to handle “administrative” and “processing” fees, supposedly so that the sale would not be held up by any bureaucratic red tape down in Mexico.

These document exchanges went on for almost a year, during which time the real estate brokers made additional financial demands, such as tax payments on the sale, and various administrative fees. Mrs. Dimitruk even sent them a $5,000 wire to pay off her remaining balance on the timeshare they thought they were selling.

In a phone interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Mr. Dimitruk said they lost over $50,000.

“They kept calling me after that saying, ‘Hey your money is waiting for you here’,” said William Dimitruk, a 73-year-old retired long-haul truck driver. “They said ‘We’re going to get in trouble if the money isn’t returned to you,’ and gave me a toll-free number to call them at.”

In the last call he had with the scammers, the man on the other end of the line confessed that some bad people had worked for them previously, but that those employees had been fired.

“Near the end of the call he said, ‘You’ve been dealing with some bad people and we fired all those bad guys,'” Dimitruk recalled. “So they were like, yeah it’s all good. You can go ahead and pay us more and we’ll send you your money.”

According to the FBI, there are indeed some very bad people behind these scams. The FBI warns the timeshare fraud schemes have been linked to the Jalisco New Generation drug cartel in Mexico.

In July 2024, the FBI and the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) warned the Jalisco cartel is running boiler room-like call centers that target people who own timeshares:

“Mexico-based [transnational criminal organizations] such as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel are increasingly targeting U.S. owners of timeshares in Mexico through complex and often yearslong telemarketing, impersonation, and advance fee schemes. They use the illicit proceeds to diversify their revenue streams and finance other criminal activities, including the manufacturing and trafficking of illicit fentanyl and other synthetic drugs into the United States.”

A July 2024 CBS News story about these scams notes that U.S. and Mexican officials last year confirmed that as many as eight young workers were confirmed dead after they apparently tried to quit jobs at a call center operated by the Jalisco cartel.

The phony escrow company the Dimitruks dealt with — ecurrencyescrow[.]llc — is no longer online. But the documents sent by their contact there referenced a few other still-active domains, including realestateassetsllc[.]com

The original registration records of both of these domains reference another domain — datasur[.]host — that is associated with dozens of other real estate and escrow-themed domains going back at least four years. Some of these domains are no longer active, while others have been previously suspended at different hosting providers.

061nyr[.]net
061-newyorkrealty[.]net
1nydevelopersgroupllc[.]com
1oceanrealtyllc[.]com
advancedclosingservicesllc[.]com
americancorporatetitle[.]com
asesorialegalsiglo[.]com
atencion-tributaria.[]com
carolinasctinc[.]net
closingandsettlementservices[.]com
closingandsettlementsllc[.]com
closingsettlementllc[.]com
crefaescrowslimited[.]net
ecurrencyescrow[.]llc
empirerllc[.]com
fiduciarocitibanamex[.]com
fondosmx[.]org
freightescrowcollc[.]com
goldmansachs-investment[.]com
hgvccorp[.]com
infodivisionfinanciera[.]com
internationaladvisorllc[.]com
jadehillrealtyllc[.]com
lewisandassociaterealty[.]com
nyreputable[.]org
privateinvestment.com[.]co
realestateassetsllc[.]com
realestateisinc[.]com
settlementandmanagement[.]com
stllcservices[.]com
stllcservices[.]net
thebluehorizonrealtyinc[.]com
walshrealtyny[.]net
windsorre[.]com

By loading ecurrencyescrowllc[.]com into the Wayback Machine at archive.org, we can see text at the top of the page that reads, “Visit our resource library for videos and tools designed to make managing your escrow disbursements a breeze.”

Searching on that bit of text at publicwww.com shows the same text appears on the website of an escrow company called Escshieldsecurity Network (escshieldsecurity[.]com). This entity claims to have been around since 2009, but the domain itself is less than two years old, and there is no contact information associated with the site. The Pennsylvania Secretary of State also has no record of a business by this name at its stated address.

Incredibly, Escshieldsecurity pitches itself as a solution to timeshare closing scams.

“By 2015, cyber thieves had realized the amount of funds involved and had targeted the real estate, title and settlement industry,” the company’s website states. “As funding became more complex and risky, agents and underwriters had little time or resources to keep up. The industry needed a simple solution that allowed it to keep pace with new funding security needs.”

The domains associated with this scam will often reference legitimate companies and licensed professionals in the real estate and closing businesses, but those real professionals often have no idea they’re being impersonated until someone starts asking around. The truth is, the original reader tip that caused KrebsOnSecurity to investigate this scheme came from one such professional whose name and reputation was being used to scam others.

It is unclear whether the Dimitruks were robbed by people working for the Jalisco cartel, but it is clear that whoever is responsible for managing many of the above-mentioned domains — including the DNS provider datasur[.]host — recently compromised their computer with information-stealing malware.

That’s according to data collected by the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence [Constella is currently an advertiser on KrebsOnSecurity]. Constella found that someone using the email address exposed in the DNS records for datasur[.]host — jyanes1920@gmail.com — also was relieved of credentials for managing most of the domains referenced above at a Mexican hosting provider.

It’s not unusual for victims of such scams to keep mum about their misfortune. Sometimes, it’s shame and embarrassment that prevents victims from filing a report with the local authorities. But in this case, victims who learn they’ve been robbed by a violent drug cartel have even more reason to remain silent.

William Dimitruk said he and his wife haven’t yet filed a police report. But after acknowledging it could help prevent harm to other would-be victims, Mr. Dimitruk said he would consider it.

There is another reason victims of scams like this should notify authorities: Occasionally, the feds will bust up one of these scam operations and seize funds that were stolen from victims. But those investigations can take years, and it can be even more years before the government starts trying to figure out who got scammed and how to remunerate victims. All too often, the real impediment to returning some of those losses is that the feds have no idea who the victims are.

If you are the victim of a timeshare scam like this, please consider filing a report with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), at ic3.gov. Other places where victims may wish to file a complaint:

Federal Trade Commission – https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov
International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network – https://www.econsumer.gov/en
Profeco – Mexican Attorney General – https://consulmex.sre.gob.mx/montreal/index.php/en/foreigners/services-foreigners/318-consumer-protection

This Windows PowerShell Phish Has Scary Potential

Many GitHub users this week received a novel phishing email warning of critical security holes in their code. Those who clicked the link for details were asked to distinguish themselves from bots by pressing a combination of keyboard keys that causes Microsoft Windows to download password-stealing malware. While it’s unlikely that many programmers fell for this scam, it’s notable because less targeted versions of it are likely to be far more successful against the average Windows user.

A reader named Chris shared an email he received this week that spoofed GitHub’s security team and warned: “Hey there! We have detected a security vulnerability in your repository. Please contact us at https://github-scanner[.]com to get more information on how to fix this issue.”

Visiting that link generates a web page that asks the visitor to “Verify You Are Human” by solving an unusual CAPTCHA.

Clicking the “I’m not a robot” button generates a pop-up message asking the user to take three sequential steps to prove their humanity. Step 1 involves simultaneously pressing the keyboard key with the Windows icon and the letter “R,” which opens a Windows “Run” prompt that will execute any specified program that is already installed on the system.

Step 2 asks the user to press the “CTRL” key and the letter “V” at the same time, which pastes malicious code from the site’s virtual clipboard.

Step 3 — pressing the “Enter” key — causes Windows to launch a PowerShell command, and then fetch and execute a malicious file from github-scanner[.]com called “l6e.exe.”

PowerShell is a powerful, cross-platform automation tool built into Windows that is designed to make it simpler for administrators to automate tasks on a PC or across multiple computers on the same network.

According to an analysis at the malware scanning service Virustotal.com, the malicious file downloaded by the pasted text is called Lumma Stealer, and it’s designed to snarf any credentials stored on the victim’s PC.

This phishing campaign may not have fooled many programmers, who no doubt natively understand that pressing the Windows and “R” keys will open up a “Run” prompt, or that Ctrl-V will dump the contents of the clipboard.

But I bet the same approach would work just fine to trick some of my less tech-savvy friends and relatives into running malware on their PCs. I’d also bet none of these people have ever heard of PowerShell, let alone had occasion to intentionally launch a PowerShell terminal.

Given those realities, it would be nice if there were a simple way to disable or at least heavily restrict PowerShell for normal end users for whom it could become more of a liability.

However, Microsoft strongly advises against nixing PowerShell because some core system processes and tasks may not function properly without it. What’s more, doing so requires tinkering with sensitive settings in the Windows registry, which can be a dicey undertaking even for the learned.

Still, it wouldn’t hurt to share this article with the Windows users in your life who fit the less-savvy profile. Because this particular scam has a great deal of room for growth and creativity.

Scam ‘Funeral Streaming’ Groups Thrive on Facebook

Scammers are flooding Facebook with groups that purport to offer video streaming of funeral services for the recently deceased. Friends and family who follow the links for the streaming services are then asked to cough up their credit card information. Recently, these scammers have branched out into offering fake streaming services for nearly any kind of event advertised on Facebook. Here’s a closer look at the size of this scheme, and some findings about who may be responsible.

KrebsOnSecurity recently heard from a reader named George who said a friend had just passed away, and he noticed that a Facebook group had been created in that friend’s memory. The page listed the correct time and date of the funeral service, which it claimed could be streamed over the Internet by following a link that led to a page requesting credit card information.

“After I posted about the site, a buddy of mine indicated [the same thing] happened to her when her friend passed away two weeks ago,” George said.

Searching Facebook/Meta for a few simple keywords like “funeral” and “stream” reveals countless funeral group pages on Facebook, some of them for services in the past and others erected for an upcoming funeral.

All of these groups include images of the deceased as their profile photo, and seek to funnel users to a handful of newly-registered video streaming websites that require a credit card payment before one can continue. Even more galling, some of these pages request donations in the name of the deceased.

It’s not clear how many Facebook users fall for this scam, but it’s worth noting that many of these fake funeral groups attract subscribers from at least some of the deceased’s followers, suggesting those users have subscribed to the groups in anticipation of the service being streamed. It’s also unclear how many people end up missing a friend or loved one’s funeral because they mistakenly thought it was being streamed online.

George said their friend’s funeral service page on Facebook included a link to the supposed live-streamed service at livestreamnow[.]xyz, a domain registered in November 2023.

According to DomainTools.com, the organization that registered this domain is called “apkdownloadweb,” is based in Rajshahi, Bangladesh, and uses the DNS servers of a Web hosting company in Bangladesh called webhostbd[.]net.

A search on “apkdownloadweb” in DomainTools shows three domains registered to this entity, including live24sports[.]xyz and onlinestreaming[.]xyz. Both of those domains also used webhostbd[.]net for DNS. Apkdownloadweb has a Facebook page, which shows a number of “live video” teasers for sports events that have already happened, and says its domain is apkdownloadweb[.]com.

Livestreamnow[.]xyz is currently hosted at a Bangladeshi web hosting provider named cloudswebserver[.]com, but historical DNS records show this website also used DNS servers from webhostbd[.]net.

The Internet address of livestreamnow[.]xyz is 148.251.54.196, at the hosting giant Hetzner in Germany. DomainTools shows this same Internet address is home to nearly 6,000 other domains (.CSV), including hundreds that reference video streaming terms, like watchliveon24[.]com and foxsportsplus[.]com.

There are thousands of domains at this IP address that include or end in the letters “bd,” the country code top-level domain for Bangladesh. Although many domains correspond to websites for electronics stores or blogs about IT topics, just as many contain a fair amount of placeholder content (think “lorem ipsum” text on the “contact” page). In other words, the sites appear legitimate at first glance, but upon closer inspection it is clear they are not currently used by active businesses.

The passive DNS records for 148.251.54.196 show a surprising number of results that are basically two domain names mushed together. For example, there is watchliveon24[.]com.playehq4ks[.]com, which displays links to multiple funeral service streaming groups on Facebook.

Another combined domain on the same Internet address — livestreaming24[.]xyz.allsportslivenow[.]com — lists dozens of links to Facebook groups for funerals, but also for virtually all types of events that are announced or posted about by Facebook users, including graduations, concerts, award ceremonies, weddings, and rodeos.

Even community events promoted by state and local police departments on Facebook are fair game for these scammers. A Facebook page maintained by the police force in Plympton, Mass. for a town social event this summer called Plympton Night Out was quickly made into two different Facebook groups that informed visitors they could stream the festivities at either espnstreamlive[.]co or skysports[.]live.

WHO’S BEHIND THE FAKEBOOK FUNERALS?

Recall that the registrant of livestreamnow[.]xyz — the bogus streaming site linked in the Facebook group for George’s late friend — was an organization called “Apkdownloadweb.” That entity’s domain — apkdownloadweb[.]com — is registered to a Mazidul Islam in Rajshahi, Bangladesh (this domain is also using Webhostbd[.]net DNS servers).

Mazidul Islam’s LinkedIn page says he is the organizer of a now defunct IT blog called gadgetsbiz[.]com, which DomainTools finds was registered to a Mehedi Hasan from Rajshahi, Bangladesh.

To bring this full circle, DomainTools finds the domain name for the DNS provider on all of the above-mentioned sites  — webhostbd[.]net — was originally registered to a Md Mehedi, and to the email address webhostbd.net@gmail.com (“MD” is a common abbreviation for Muhammad/Mohammod/Muhammed).

A search on that email address at Constella finds a breached record from the data broker Apollo.io saying its owner’s full name is Mohammod Mehedi Hasan. Unfortunately, this is not a particularly unique name in that region of the world.

But as luck would have it, sometime last year the administrator of apkdownloadweb[.]com managed to infect their Windows PC with password-stealing malware. We know this because the raw logs of data stolen from this administrator’s PC were indexed by the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence [full disclosure: As of this month, Constella is an advertiser on this website].

These so-called “stealer logs” are mostly generated by opportunistic infections from information-stealing trojans that are sold on cybercrime markets. A typical set of logs for a compromised PC will include any usernames and passwords stored in any browser on the system, as well as a list of recent URLs visited and files downloaded.

Malware purveyors will often deploy infostealer malware by bundling it with “cracked” or pirated software titles. Indeed, the stealer logs for the administrator of apkdownloadweb[.]com show this user’s PC became infected immediately after they downloaded a booby-trapped mobile application development toolkit.

Those stolen credentials indicate Apkdownloadweb[.]com is maintained by a 20-something native of Dhaka, Bangladesh named Mohammod Abdullah Khondokar.

The “browser history” folder from the admin of Apkdownloadweb shows Khondokar recently left a comment on the Facebook page of Mohammod Mehedi Hasan, and Khondokar’s Facebook profile says the two are friends.

Neither MD Hasan nor MD Abdullah Khondokar responded to requests for comment. KrebsOnSecurity also sought comment from Meta.

Sextortion Scams Now Include Photos of Your Home

An old but persistent email scam known as “sextortion” has a new personalized touch: The missives, which claim that malware has captured webcam footage of recipients pleasuring themselves, now include a photo of the target’s home in a bid to make threats about publishing the videos more frightening and convincing.

This week, several readers reported receiving sextortion emails that addressed them by name and included images of their street or front yard that were apparently lifted from an online mapping application such as Google Maps.

The message purports to have been sent from a hacker who’s compromised your computer and used your webcam to record a video of you while you were watching porn. The missive threatens to release the video to all of your contacts unless you pay a Bitcoin ransom. In this case, the demand is just shy of $2,000, payable by scanning a QR code embedded in the email.

Following a salutation that includes the recipient’s full name, the start of the message reads, “Is visiting [recipient’s street address] a more convenient way to contact if you don’t take action. Nice location btw.” Below that is the photo of the recipient’s street address.

The message tells people they have 24 hours to pay up, or else their embarrassing videos will be released to all of their contacts, friends and family members.

“Don’t even think about replying to this, it’s pointless,” the message concludes. “I don’t make mistakes, [recipient’s name]. If I notice that you’ve shared or discussed this email with someone else, your shitty video will instantly start getting sent to your contacts.”

The remaining sections of the two-page sextortion message (which arrives as a PDF attachment) are fairly formulaic and include thematic elements seen in most previous sextortion waves. Those include claims that the extortionist has installed malware on your computer (in this case the scammer claims the spyware is called “Pegasus,” and that they are watching everything you do on your machine).

Previous innovations in sextortion customization involved sending emails that included at least one password they had previously used at an account online that was tied to their email address.

Owners of 1-Time Passcode Theft Service Plead Guilty

Three men in the United Kingdom have pleaded guilty to operating otp[.]agency, a once popular online service that helped attackers intercept the one-time passcodes (OTPs) that many websites require as a second authentication factor in addition to passwords.

Launched in November 2019, OTP Agency was a service for intercepting one-time passcodes needed to log in to various websites. Scammers who had already stolen someone’s bank account credentials could enter the target’s phone number and name, and the service would initiate an automated phone call to the target that warned them about unauthorized activity on their account.

The call would prompt the target to enter a one-time passcode that was sent to the user via SMS when the thieves attempted to log in. Any codes shared by the target were then relayed to the scammer’s user panel at the OTP Agency website.

A statement published Aug. 30 by the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) said three men pleaded guilty to running OTP Agency: Callum Picari, 22, from Hornchurch, Essex; Vijayasidhurshan Vijayanathan, 21, from Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire; and Aza Siddeeque, 19, from Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire.

KrebsOnSecurity profiled OTP Agency in a February 2021 story about arrests tied to another phishing-related service based in the U.K. Someone claiming to represent OTP Agency then posted several comments on the piece, wherein they claimed the story was libelous and that they were a legitimate anti-fraud service. However, the service’s Telegram channel clearly showed its proprietors had built OTP Agency with one purpose in mind: To help their customers take over online accounts.

Within hours of that publication, OTP Agency shuttered its website and announced it was closing up shop and purging its user database. The NCA said the February 2021 story prompted a panicked message exchange between Picari and Vijayanathan:

Picari said: bro we are in big trouble… U will get me bagged… Bro delete the chat

Vijayanathan: Are you sure

Picari: So much evidence in there

Vijayanathan: Are you 100% sure

Picari: It’s so incriminating…Take a look and search ‘fraud’…Just think of all the evidence…that we cba to find…in the OTP chat…they will find

Vijayanathan: Exactly so if we just shut EVERYTHING down

Picari: They went to our first ever msg…We look incriminating…if we shut down…I say delete the chat…Our chat is Fraud 100%

Vijayanathan : Everyone with a brain will tell you stop it here and move on

Picari: Just because we close it doesn’t mean we didn’t do it…But deleting our chat…Will f*^k their investigations…There’s nothing fraudulent on the site

Despite deleting its Telegram channel, OTP Agency evidently found it difficult to walk away from its customers (and/or the money). Instead of shutting down as Vijayanathan wisely advised, just a few days later OTP Agency was communicating with customers on a new Telegram channel, offering a new login page and assuring existing customers that their usernames, passwords and balances would remain the same.

But that revival would be short-lived. The NCA said the site was taken offline less than a month later when the trio were arrested. NCA investigators said more than 12,500 people were targeted by OTP Agency users during the 18 months the service was active.

Picari was the owner, developer and main beneficiary of the service, and his personal information and ownership of OTP Agency was revealed in February 2020 in a “dox” posted to the now-defunct English-language cybercrime forum Raidforums. The NCA said it began investigating the service in June 2020.

OTP Agency might be gone, but several other similar OTP interception services are still in operation and accepting new customers, including a long-running service KrebsOnSecurity profiled in September 2021 called SMSRanger. More on SMSRanger in an upcoming post.

Text messages, emails and phone calls warning recipients about potential fraud are some of the most common scam lures. If someone (or something) calls saying they’re from your bank, or asks you to provide any personal or financial information, do not respond.  Just hang up, full stop.

If the call has you worried about the security and integrity of your account, check the account status online, or call your financial institution — ideally using a phone number that came from the bank’s Web site or from the back of your payment card.

Further reading: When in Doubt, Hang Up, Look Up, and Call Back

When Get-Out-The-Vote Efforts Look Like Phishing

Multiple media reports this week warned Americans to be on guard against a new phishing scam that arrives in a text message informing recipients they are not yet registered to vote. A bit of digging reveals the missives were sent by a California political consulting firm as part of a well-meaning but potentially counterproductive get-out-the-vote effort that had all the hallmarks of a phishing campaign.

On Aug. 27, the local Channel 4 affiliate WDIV in Detroit warned about a new SMS message wave that they said could prevent registered voters from casting their ballot. The story didn’t explain how or why the scam could block eligible voters from casting ballots, but it did show one of the related text messages, which linked to the site all-vote.com.

“We have you in our records as not registered to vote,” the unbidden SMS advised. “Check your registration status & register in 2 minutes.”

Similar warnings came from an ABC station in Arizona, and from an NBC affiliate in Pennsylvania, where election officials just issued an alert to be on the lookout for scam messages coming from all-vote.com. Some people interviewed who received the messages said they figured it was a scam because they knew for a fact they were registered to vote in their state. WDIV even interviewed a seventh-grader from Canada who said he also got the SMS saying he wasn’t registered to vote.

Someone trying to determine whether all-vote.com was legitimate might visit the main URL first (as opposed to just clicking the link in the SMS) to find out more about the organization. But visiting all-vote.com directly presents one with a login page to an online service called bl.ink. DomainTools.com finds all-vote.com was registered on July 10, 2024. Red flag #1.

Another version of this SMS campaign told recipients to check their voter status at a site called votewin.org, which DomainTools says was registered July 9, 2024. There is little information about who runs votewin.org on its website, and the contact page leads to generic contact form. Red Flag #2.

What’s more, Votewin.org asks visitors to supply their name, address, email address, date of birth, mobile phone number, while pre-checking options to sign the visitor up for more notifications. Big Red Flag #3.

Votewin.org’s Terms of Service referenced a California-based voter engagement platform called VoteAmerica LLC. The same voter registration query form advertised in the SMS messages is available if one clicks the “check your registration status” link on voteamerica.org.

VoteAmerica founder Debra Cleaver told KrebsOnSecurity the entity responsible for the SMS campaigns telling people they weren’t registered is Movement Labs, a political consulting firm in San Francisco.

Cleaver said her office had received several inquiries about the messages, which violate a key tenet of election outreach: Never tell the recipient what their voter status may be.

“That’s one of the worst practices,” Cleaver said. “You never tell someone what the voter file says because voter files are not reliable, and are often out of date.”

Reached via email, Movement Labs founder Yoni Landau said the SMS campaigns targeted “underrepresented groups in the electorate, young people, folks who are moving, low income households and the like, who are unregistered in our databases, with the intent to help them register to vote.”

Landau said filling out the form on Votewin.org merely checks to see if the visitor is registered to vote in their state, and then attempts to help them register if not.

“We understand that many people are jarred by the messages – we tested hundreds of variations of messages and found that these had the largest impact on someone’s likelihood to register,” he said. “I’m deeply sorry for anyone that may have gotten the message in error, who is registered to vote, and we’re looking into our content now to see if there are any variations that might be less certain but still as effective in generating new legal registrations.”

Cleaver said Movement Labs’ SMS campaign may have been incompetent, but it wasn’t malicious.

“When you work in voter mobilization, it’s not enough to want to do good, you actually need to be good,” she said. “At the end of the day the end result of incompetence and maliciousness is the same: increased chaos, reduced voter turnout, and long-term harm to our democracy.”

To register to vote or to update your voter registration, visit vote.gov and select your state or region.

New 0-Day Attacks Linked to China’s ‘Volt Typhoon’

Malicious hackers are exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Versa Director, a software product used by many Internet and IT service providers. Researchers believe the activity is linked to Volt Typhoon, a Chinese cyber espionage group focused on infiltrating critical U.S. networks and laying the groundwork for the ability to disrupt communications between the United States and Asia during any future armed conflict with China.

Versa Director systems are primarily used by Internet service providers (ISPs), as well as managed service providers (MSPs) that cater to the IT needs of many small to mid-sized businesses simultaneously. In a security advisory published Aug. 26, Versa urged customers to deploy a patch for the vulnerability (CVE-2024-39717), which the company said is fixed in Versa Director 22.1.4 or later.

Versa said the weakness allows attackers to upload a file of their choosing to vulnerable systems. The advisory placed much of the blame on Versa customers who “failed to implement system hardening and firewall guidelines…leaving a management port exposed on the internet that provided the threat actors with initial access.”

Versa’s advisory doesn’t say how it learned of the zero-day flaw, but its vulnerability listing at mitre.org acknowledges “there are reports of others based on backbone telemetry observations of a 3rd party provider, however these are unconfirmed to date.”

Those third-party reports came in late June 2024 from Michael Horka, senior lead information security engineer at Black Lotus Labs, the security research arm of Lumen Technologies, which operates one of the global Internet’s largest backbones.

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Horka said Black Lotus Labs identified a web-based backdoor on Versa Director systems belonging to four U.S. victims and one non-U.S. victim in the ISP and MSP sectors, with the earliest known exploit activity occurring at a U.S. ISP on June 12, 2024.

“This makes Versa Director a lucrative target for advanced persistent threat (APT) actors who would want to view or control network infrastructure at scale, or pivot into additional (or downstream) networks of interest,” Horka wrote in a blog post published today.

Black Lotus Labs said it assessed with “medium” confidence that Volt Typhoon was responsible for the compromises, noting the intrusions bear the hallmarks of the Chinese state-sponsored espionage group — including zero-day attacks targeting IT infrastructure providers, and Java-based backdoors that run in memory only.

In May 2023, the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a joint warning (PDF) about Volt Typhoon, also known as “Bronze Silhouette” and “Insidious Taurus,” which described how the group uses small office/home office (SOHO) network devices to hide their activity.

In early December 2023, Black Lotus Labs published its findings on “KV-botnet,” thousands of compromised SOHO routers that were chained together to form a covert data transfer network supporting various Chinese state-sponsored hacking groups, including Volt Typhoon.

In January 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice disclosed the FBI had executed a court-authorized takedown of the KV-botnet shortly before Black Lotus Labs released its December report.

In February 2024, CISA again joined the FBI and NSA in warning Volt Typhoon had compromised the IT environments of multiple critical infrastructure organizations — primarily in communications, energy, transportation systems, and water and wastewater sectors — in the continental and non-continental United States and its territories, including Guam.

“Volt Typhoon’s choice of targets and pattern of behavior is not consistent with traditional cyber espionage or intelligence gathering operations, and the U.S. authoring agencies assess with high confidence that Volt Typhoon actors are pre-positioning themselves on IT networks to enable lateral movement to OT [operational technology] assets to disrupt functions,” that alert warned.

In a speech at Vanderbilt University in April, FBI Director Christopher Wray said China is developing the “ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing,” and that China’s plan is to “land blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic.”

Ryan English, an information security engineer at Lumen, said it’s disappointing his employer didn’t at least garner an honorable mention in Versa’s security advisory. But he said he’s glad there are now a lot fewer Versa systems exposed to this attack.

“Lumen has for the last nine weeks been very intimate with their leadership with the goal in mind of helping them mitigate this,” English said. “We’ve given them everything we could along the way, so it kind of sucks being referenced just as a third party.”

Local Networks Go Global When Domain Names Collide

The proliferation of new top-level domains (TLDs) has exacerbated a well-known security weakness: Many organizations set up their internal Microsoft authentication systems years ago using domain names in TLDs that didn’t exist at the time. Meaning, they are continuously sending their Windows usernames and passwords to domain names they do not control and which are freely available for anyone to register. Here’s a look at one security researcher’s efforts to map and shrink the size of this insidious problem.

At issue is a well-known security and privacy threat called “namespace collision,” a situation where domain names intended to be used exclusively on an internal company network end up overlapping with domains that can resolve normally on the open Internet.

Windows computers on a private corporate network validate other things on that network using a Microsoft innovation called Active Directory, which is the umbrella term for a broad range of identity-related services in Windows environments. A core part of the way these things find each other involves a Windows feature called “DNS name devolution,” a kind of network shorthand that makes it easier to find other computers or servers without having to specify a full, legitimate domain name for those resources.

Consider the hypothetical private network internalnetwork.example.com: When an employee on this network wishes to access a shared drive called “drive1,” there’s no need to type “drive1.internalnetwork.example.com” into Windows Explorer; entering “\\drive1\” alone will suffice, and Windows takes care of the rest.

But problems can arise when an organization has built their Active Directory network on top of a domain they don’t own or control. While that may sound like a bonkers way to design a corporate authentication system, keep in mind that many organizations built their networks long before the introduction of hundreds of new top-level domains (TLDs), like .network, .inc, and .llc.

For example, a company in 2005 builds their Microsoft Active Directory service around the domain company.llc, perhaps reasoning that since .llc wasn’t even a routable TLD, the domain would simply fail to resolve if the organization’s Windows computers were ever used outside of its local network.

Alas, in 2018, the .llc TLD was born and began selling domains. From then on, anyone who registered company.llc would be able to passively intercept that organization’s Microsoft Windows credentials, or actively modify those connections in some way — such as redirecting them somewhere malicious.

Philippe Caturegli, founder of the security consultancy Seralys, is one of several researchers seeking to chart the size of the namespace collision problem. As a professional penetration tester, Caturegli has long exploited these collisions to attack specific targets that were paying to have their cyber defenses probed. But over the past year, Caturegli has been gradually mapping this vulnerability across the Internet by looking for clues that appear in self-signed security certificates (e.g. SSL/TLS certs).

Caturegli has been scanning the open Internet for self-signed certificates referencing domains in a variety of TLDs likely to appeal to businesses, including .ad, .associates, .center, .cloud, .consulting, .dev, .digital, .domains, .email, .global, .gmbh, .group, .holdings, .host, .inc, .institute, .international, .it, .llc, .ltd, .management, .ms, .name, .network, .security, .services, .site, .srl, .support, .systems, .tech, .university, .win and .zone, among others.

Seralys found certificates referencing more than 9,000 distinct domains across those TLDs. Their analysis determined many TLDs had far more exposed domains than others, and that about 20 percent of the domains they found ending .ad, .cloud and .group remain unregistered.

“The scale of the issue seems bigger than I initially anticipated,” Caturegli said in an interview with KrebsOnSecurity. “And while doing my research, I have also identified government entities (foreign and domestic), critical infrastructures, etc. that have such misconfigured assets.”

REAL-TIME CRIME

Some of the above-listed TLDs are not new and correspond to country-code TLDs, like .it for Italy, and .ad, the country-code TLD for the tiny nation of Andorra. Caturegli said many organizations no doubt viewed a domain ending in .ad as a convenient shorthand for an internal Active Directory setup, while being unaware or unworried that someone could actually register such a domain and intercept all of their Windows credentials and any unencrypted traffic.

When Caturegli discovered an encryption certificate being actively used for the domain memrtcc.ad, the domain was still available for registration. He then learned the .ad registry requires prospective customers to show a valid trademark for a domain before it can be registered.

Undeterred, Caturegli found a domain registrar that would sell him the domain for $160, and handle the trademark registration for another $500 (on subsequent .ad registrations, he located a company in Andorra that could process the trademark application for half that amount).

Caturegli said that immediately after setting up a DNS server for memrtcc.ad, he began receiving a flood of communications from hundreds of Microsoft Windows computers trying to authenticate to the domain. Each request contained a username and a hashed Windows password, and upon searching the usernames online Caturegli concluded they all belonged to police officers in Memphis, Tenn.

“It looks like all of the police cars there have a laptop in the cars, and they’re all attached to this memrtcc.ad domain that I now own,” Caturegli said, noting wryly that “memrtcc” stands for “Memphis Real-Time Crime Center.”

Caturegli said setting up an email server record for memrtcc.ad caused him to begin receiving automated messages from the police department’s IT help desk, including trouble tickets regarding the city’s Okta authentication system.

Mike Barlow, information security manager for the City of Memphis, confirmed the Memphis Police’s systems were sharing their Microsoft Windows credentials with the domain, and that the city was working with Caturegli to have the domain transferred to them.

“We are working with the Memphis Police Department to at least somewhat mitigate the issue in the meantime,” Barlow said.

Domain administrators have long been encouraged to use .local for internal domain names, because this TLD is reserved for use by local networks and cannot be routed over the open Internet. However, Caturegli said many organizations seem to have missed that memo and gotten things backwards — setting up their internal Active Directory structure around the perfectly routable domain local.ad.

Caturegli said he knows this because he “defensively” registered local.ad, which he said is currently used by multiple large organizations for Active Directory setups — including a European mobile phone provider, and the City of Newcastle in the United Kingdom.

ONE WPAD TO RULE THEM ALL

Caturegli said he has now defensively registered a number of domains ending in .ad, such as internal.ad and schema.ad. But perhaps the most dangerous domain in his stable is wpad.ad. WPAD stands for Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Protocol, which is an ancient, on-by-default feature built into every version of Microsoft Windows that was designed to make it simpler for Windows computers to automatically find and download any proxy settings required by the local network.

Trouble is, any organization that chose a .ad domain they don’t own for their Active Directory setup will have a whole bunch of Microsoft systems constantly trying to reach out to wpad.ad if those machines have proxy automated detection enabled.

Security researchers have been beating up on WPAD for more than two decades now, warning time and again how it can be abused for nefarious ends. At this year’s DEF CON security conference in Las Vegas, for example, a researcher showed what happened after they registered the domain wpad.dk: Immediately after switching on the domain, they received a flood of WPAD requests from Microsoft Windows systems in Denmark that had namespace collisions in their Active Directory environments.

For his part, Caturegli set up a server on wpad.ad to resolve and record the Internet address of any Windows systems trying to reach Microsoft Sharepoint servers, and saw that over one week it received more than 140,000 hits from hosts around the world attempting to connect.

The fundamental problem with WPAD is the same with Active Directory: Both are technologies originally designed to be used in closed, static, trusted office environments, and neither was built with today’s mobile devices or workforce in mind.

Probably one big reason organizations with potential namespace collision problems don’t fix them is that rebuilding one’s Active Directory infrastructure around a new domain name can be incredibly disruptive, costly, and risky, while the potential threat is considered comparatively low.

But Caturegli said ransomware gangs and other cybercrime groups could siphon huge volumes of Microsoft Windows credentials from quite a few companies with just a small up-front investment.

“It’s an easy way to gain that initial access without even having to launch an actual attack,” he said. “You just wait for the misconfigured workstation to connect to you and send you their credentials.”

If we ever learn that cybercrime groups are using namespace collisions to launch ransomware attacks, nobody can say they weren’t warned. Mike O’Connor, an early domain name investor who registered a number of choice domains such as bar.com, place.com and television.com, warned loudly and often back in 2013 that then-pending plans to add more than 1,000 new TLDs would massively expand the number of namespace collisions.

Mr. O’Connor’s most famous domain is corp.com, because for several decades he watched in horror as hundreds of thousands of Microsoft PCs continuously blasted his domain with credentials from organizations that had set up their Active Directory environment around the domain corp.com.

It turned out that Microsoft had actually used corp.com as an example of how one might set up Active Directory in some editions of Windows NT. Worse, some of the traffic going to corp.com was coming from Microsoft’s internal networks, indicating some part of Microsoft’s own internal infrastructure was misconfigured. When O’Connor said he was ready to sell corp.com to the highest bidder in 2020, Microsoft agreed to buy the domain for an undisclosed amount.

“I kind of imagine this problem to be something like a town [that] knowingly built a water supply out of lead pipes, or vendors of those projects who knew but didn’t tell their customers,” O’Connor told KrebsOnSecurity. “This is not an inadvertent thing like Y2K where everybody was surprised by what happened. People knew and didn’t care.”

National Public Data Published Its Own Passwords

New details are emerging about a breach at National Public Data (NPD), a consumer data broker that recently spilled hundreds of millions of Americans’ Social Security Numbers, addresses, and phone numbers online. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that another NPD data broker which shares access to the same consumer records inadvertently published the passwords to its back-end database in a file that was freely available from its homepage until today.

In April, a cybercriminal named USDoD began selling data stolen from NPD. In July, someone leaked what was taken, including the names, addresses, phone numbers and in some cases email addresses for more than 272 million people (including many who are now deceased).

NPD acknowledged the intrusion on Aug. 12, saying it dates back to a security incident in December 2023. In an interview last week, USDoD blamed the July data leak on another malicious hacker who also had access to the company’s database, which they claimed has been floating around the underground since December 2023.

Following last week’s story on the breadth of the NPD breach, a reader alerted KrebsOnSecurity that a sister NPD property — the background search service recordscheck.net — was hosting an archive that included the usernames and password for the site’s administrator.

A review of that archive, which was available from the Records Check website until just before publication this morning (August 19), shows it includes the source code and plain text usernames and passwords for different components of recordscheck.net, which is visually similar to nationalpublicdata.com and features identical login pages.

The exposed archive, which was named “members.zip,” indicates RecordsCheck users were all initially assigned the same six-character password and instructed to change it, but many did not.

According to the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence, the passwords included in the source code archive are identical to credentials exposed in previous data breaches that involved email accounts belonging to NPD’s founder, an actor and retired sheriff’s deputy from Florida named Salvatore “Sal” Verini.

Reached via email, Mr. Verini said the exposed archive (a .zip file) containing recordscheck.net credentials has been removed from the company’s website, and that the site is slated to cease operations “in the next week or so.”

“Regarding the zip, it has been removed but was an old version of the site with non-working code and passwords,” Verini told KrebsOnSecurity. “Regarding your question, it is an active investigation, in which we cannot comment on at this point. But once we can, we will [be] with you, as we follow your blog. Very informative.”

The leaked recordscheck.net source code indicates the website was created by a web development firm based in Lahore, Pakistan called creationnext.com, which did not return messages seeking comment. CreationNext.com’s homepage features a positive testimonial from Sal Verini.

There are now several websites that have been stood up to help people learn if their SSN and other data was exposed in this breach. One is npdbreach.com, a lookup page erected by Atlas Data Privacy Corp. Another lookup service is available at npd.pentester.com. Both sites show NPD had old and largely inaccurate data on Yours Truly.

The best advice for those concerned about this breach is to freeze one’s credit file at each of the major consumer reporting bureaus. Having a freeze on your files makes it much harder for identity thieves to create new accounts in your name, and it limits who can view your credit information.

A freeze is a good idea because all of the information that ID thieves need to assume your identity is now broadly available from multiple sources, thanks to the multiplicity of data breaches we’ve seen involving SSN data and other key static data points about people.

There are numerous cybercriminal services that offer detailed background checks on consumers, including full SSNs. These services are powered by compromised accounts at data brokers that cater to private investigators and law enforcement officials, and some are now fully automated via Telegram instant message bots.

In November 2023, KrebsOnSecurity wrote about one such service, which was being powered by hacked accounts at the U.S. consumer data broker USInfoSearch.com. This is notable because the leaked source code indicates Records Check pulled background reports on people by querying NPD’s database and records at USInfoSearch. KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from USInfoSearch and will update this story if they respond.

The point is, if you’re an American who hasn’t frozen their credit files and you haven’t yet experienced some form of new account fraud, the ID thieves probably just haven’t gotten around to you yet.

All Americans are also entitled to obtain a free copy of their credit report weekly from each of the three major credit bureaus. It used to be that consumers were allowed one free report from each of the bureaus annually, but in October 2023 the Federal Trade Commission announced the bureaus had permanently extended a program that lets you check your credit report once a week for free.

If you haven’t done this in a while, now would be an excellent time to order your files. To place a freeze, you’ll need to create an account at each of the three major reporting bureaus, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Once you’ve established an account, you should be able to then view and freeze your credit file. If you spot errors, such as random addresses and phone numbers you don’t recognize, do not ignore them. Dispute any inaccuracies you may find.

NationalPublicData.com Hack Exposes a Nation’s Data

A great many readers this month reported receiving alerts that their Social Security Number, name, address and other personal information were exposed in a breach at a little-known but aptly-named consumer data broker called NationalPublicData.com. This post examines what we know about a breach that has exposed hundreds of millions of consumer records. We’ll also take a closer look at the data broker that got hacked — a background check company founded by an actor and retired sheriff’s deputy from Florida.

On July 21, 2024, denizens of the cybercrime community Breachforums released more than 4 terabytes of data they claimed was stolen from nationalpublicdata.com, a Florida-based company that collects data on consumers and processes background checks.

The breach tracking service HaveIBeenPwned.com and the cybercrime-focused Twitter account vx-underground both concluded the leak is the same information first put up for sale in April 2024 by a prolific cybercriminal who goes by the name “USDoD.”

On April 7, USDoD posted a sales thread on Breachforums for four terabytes of data — 2.9 billion rows of records — they claimed was taken from nationalpublicdata.com. The snippets of stolen data that USDoD offered as teasers showed rows of names, addresses, phone numbers, and Social Security Numbers (SSNs). Their asking price? $3.5 million.

Many media outlets mistakenly reported that the National Public data breach affects 2.9 billion people (that figure actually refers to the number of rows in the leaked data sets). HaveIBeenPwned.com’s Troy Hunt analyzed the leaked data and found it is a somewhat disparate collection of consumer and business records, including the real names, addresses, phone numbers and SSNs of millions of Americans (both living and deceased), and 70 million rows from a database of U.S. criminal records.

Hunt said he found 137 million unique email addresses in the leaked data, but stressed that there were no email addresses in the files containing SSN records.

“If you find yourself in this data breach via HaveIBeenPwned.com, there’s no evidence your SSN was leaked, and if you’re in the same boat as me, the data next to your record may not even be correct.”

Nationalpublicdata.com publicly acknowledged a breach in a statement on Aug. 12, saying “there appears to have been a data security incident that may have involved some of your personal information. The incident appears to have involved a third-party bad actor that was trying to hack into data in late December 2023, with potential leaks of certain data in April 2024 and summer 2024.”

The company said the information “suspected of being breached” contained name, email address, phone number, social security number, and mailing address(es).

“We cooperated with law enforcement and governmental investigators and conducted a review of the potentially affected records and will try to notify you if there are further significant developments applicable to you,” the statement continues. “We have also implemented additional security measures in efforts to prevent the reoccurrence of such a breach and to protect our systems.”

Hunt’s analysis didn’t say how many unique SSNs were included in the leaked data. But according to researchers at Atlas Data Privacy Corp., there are 272 million unique SSNs in the entire records set.

Atlas found most records have a name, SSN, and home address, and that approximately 26 percent of those records included a phone number. Atlas said they verified 5,000 addresses and phone numbers, and found the records pertain to people born before Jan. 1, 2002 (with very few exceptions).

If there is a tiny silver lining to the breach it is this: Atlas discovered that many of the records related to people who are now almost certainly deceased. They found the average age of the consumer in these records is 70, and fully two million records are related to people whose date of birth would make them more than 120 years old today.

TWISTED HISTORY

Where did National Public Data get its consumer data? The company’s website doesn’t say, but it is operated by an entity in Coral Springs, Fla. called Jerico Pictures Inc. The website for Jerico Pictures is not currently responding. However, cached versions of it at archive.org show it is a film studio with offices in Los Angeles and South Florida.

The Florida Secretary of State says Jerico Pictures is owned by Salvatore (Sal) Verini Jr., a retired deputy with the Broward County Sheriff’s office. The Secretary of State also says Mr. Verini is or was a founder of several other Florida companies, including National Criminal Data LLC, Twisted History LLC, Shadowglade LLC and Trinity Entertainment Inc., among others.

Mr. Verini did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Cached copies of Mr. Verini’s vanity domain salvatoreverini.com recount his experience in acting (e.g. a role in a 1980s detective drama with Burt Reynolds) and more recently producing dramas and documentaries for several streaming channels.

Pivoting on the email address used to register that vanity domain, DomainTools.com finds several other domains whose history offers a clearer picture of the types of data sources relied upon by National Public Data.

One of those domains is recordscheck.net (formerly recordscheck.info), which advertises “instant background checks, SSN traces, employees screening and more.” Another now-defunct business tied to Mr. Verini’s email — publicrecordsunlimited.com — said it obtained consumer data from a variety of sources, including: birth, marriage and death records; voting records; professional licenses; state and federal criminal records.

It remains unclear how thieves originally obtained these records from National Public Data. KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from USDoD, who is perhaps best known for hacking into Infragard, an FBI program that facilitates information sharing about cyber and physical threats with vetted people in the private sector.

USDoD said they indeed sold the same data set that was leaked on Breachforums this past month, but that the person who leaked the data did not obtain it from them. USDoD said the data stolen from National Public Data had traded hands several times since it was initially stolen in December 2023.

“The database has been floating around for a while,” USDoD said. “I was not the first one to get it.”

USDoD said the person who originally stole the data from NPD was a hacker who goes by the handle SXUL. That user appears to have deleted their Telegram account several days ago, presumably in response to intense media coverage of the breach.

ANALYSIS

Data brokers like National Public Data typically get their information by scouring federal, state and local government records. Those government files include voting registries, property filings, marriage certificates, motor vehicle records, criminal records, court documents, death records, professional licenses, bankruptcy filings, and more.

Americans may believe they have the right to opt out of having these records collected and sold to anyone. But experts say these underlying sources of information — the above-mentioned “public” records — are carved out from every single state consumer privacy law. This includes California’s privacy regime, which is often held up as the national leader in state privacy regulations.

You see, here in America, virtually anyone can become a consumer data broker. And with few exceptions, there aren’t any special requirements for brokers to show that they actually care about protecting the data they collect, store, repackage and sell so freely.

In February 2023, PeopleConnect, the owners of the background search services TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate, acknowledged a breach affecting 20 million customers who paid the data brokers to run background checks. The data exposed included email addresses, hashed passwords, first and last names, and phone numbers.

In 2019, malicious hackers stole data on more than 1.5 billion people from People Data Labs, a San Francisco data broker whose people-search services linked hundreds of millions of email addresses, LinkedIn and Facebook profiles and more than 200 million valid cell phone numbers.

These data brokers are the digital equivalent of massive oil tankers wandering the coast without GPS or an anchor, because when they get hacked, the effect is very much akin to the ecological and economic fallout from a giant oil spill.

It’s an apt analogy because the dissemination of so much personal data all at once has ripple effects for months and years to come, as this information invariably feeds into a vast underground ocean of scammers who are already equipped and staffed to commit identity theft and account takeovers at scale.

It’s also apt because much like with real-life oil spills, the cleanup costs and effort from data spills — even just vast collections of technically “public” documents like the NPD corpus — can be enormous, and most of the costs associated with that fall to consumers, directly or indirectly.

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?

Should you worry that your SSN and other personal data might be exposed in this breach? That isn’t necessary for people who’ve been following the advice here for years, which is to freeze one’s credit file at each of the major consumer reporting bureaus. Having a freeze on your files makes it much harder for identity thieves to create new accounts in your name, and it limits who can view your credit information.

The main reason I recommend the freeze is that all of the information ID thieves need to assume your identity is now broadly available from multiple sources, thanks to the multiplicity of data breaches we’ve seen involving SSN data and other key static data points about people.

But beyond that, there are numerous cybercriminal services that offer detailed background checks on consumers, including full SSNs. These services are powered by compromised accounts at data brokers that cater to private investigators and law enforcement officials, and some are now fully automated via Telegram instant message bots. Meaning, if you’re an American who hasn’t frozen their credit files and you haven’t yet experienced some form of new account fraud, the ID thieves probably just haven’t gotten around to you yet.

All Americans are also entitled to obtain a free copy of their credit report weekly from each of the three major credit bureaus. It used to be that consumers were allowed one free report from each of the bureaus annually, but in October 2023 the Federal Trade Commission announced the bureaus had permanently extended a program that lets you check your credit report once a week for free.

If you haven’t done this in a while, now would be an excellent time to order your files. To place a freeze, you need to create an account at each of the three major reporting bureaus, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Once you’ve established an account, you should be able to then view and freeze your credit file. Dispute any inaccuracies you may find. If you spot errors, such as random addresses and phone numbers you don’t recognize, do not ignore them: Identity theft and new account fraud are not problems that get easier to solve by letting them fester.

Mr. Verini probably didn’t respond to requests for comment because his company is now the subject of a class-action lawsuit (NB: the lawsuit also erroneously claims 3 billion people were affected). These lawsuits are practically inevitable now after a major breach, but they also have the unfortunate tendency to let regulators and lawmakers off the hook.

Almost every time there’s a major breach of SSN data, Americans are offered credit monitoring services. Most of the time, those services come from one of the three major consumer credit bureaus, the same companies that profit by compiling and selling incredibly detailed dossiers on consumers’ financial lives. The same companies that use dark patterns to trick people into paying for “credit lock” services that achieve a similar result as a freeze but still let the bureaus sell your data to their partners.

But class-actions alone will not drive us toward a national conversation about what needs to change. Americans currently have very few rights to opt out of the personal and financial surveillance, data collection and sale that is pervasive in today’s tech-based economy.

The breach at National Public Data may not be the worst data breach ever. But it does present yet another opportunity for this country’s leaders to acknowledge that the SSN has completely failed as a measure of authentication or authorization. It was never a good idea to use as an authenticator to begin with, and it is certainly no longer suitable for this purpose.

The truth is that these data brokers will continue to proliferate and thrive (and get hacked and relieved of their data) until Congress begins to realize it’s time for some consumer privacy and data protection laws that are relevant to life in the 21st century.

Further reporting: National Public Data Published Its Own Passwords

Update, Aug. 16, 8:00 a.m. ET: Corrected the story to note that consumers can now obtain a free credit report from each of the three consumer reporting bureaus weekly, instead of just annually.

Update, Aug. 23, 12:33 p.m. ET: Added link to latest story on NPD breach.

Cybercrime Rapper Sues Bank over Fraud Investigation

In January, KrebsOnSecurity wrote about rapper Punchmade Dev, whose music videos sing the praises of a cybercrime lifestyle. That story showed how Punchmade’s social media profiles promoted Punchmade-themed online stores selling bank account and payment card data. The subject of that piece, a 22-year-old Kentucky man, is now brazenly suing his financial institution after it blocked a $75,000 wire transfer and froze his account, citing an active law enforcement investigation.

With memorable hits such as “Internet Swiping” and “Million Dollar Criminal” earning millions of views, Punchmade Dev has leveraged his considerable following to peddle tutorials on how to commit financial crimes online. But until recently, there wasn’t much to support a conclusion that Punchmade was actually doing the cybercrime things he promotes in his songs.

That changed earlier this year when KrebsOnSecurity showed how Punchmade’s social media handles were promoting Punchmade e-commerce shops online that sold access to Cashapp and PayPal accounts with balances, software for printing checks, as well as personal and financial data on Americans.

The January story traced Punchmade’s various online properties to a 22-year-old Devon Turner from Lexington, Ky. Reached via his profile on X/Twitter, Punchmade Dev said they were not affiliated with the lawsuit filed by Turner [Punchmade’s X account provided this denial even though it has still not responded to requests for comment from the first story about him in January]. Meanwhile, Mr. Turner has declined multiple requests to comment for this story.

On June 26, Turner filed a pro se lawsuit against PNC Bank, alleging “unlawful discriminatory and tortuous action” after he was denied a wire transfer in the amount of $75,000. PNC Bank did not respond to a request for comment.

Turner’s complaint states that a follow-up call to his bank revealed the account had been closed due to “suspicious activity,” and that he was no longer welcome to patronize PNC Bank.

“The Plaintiff is a very successful African-American business owner, who has generated millions of dollars with his businesses, has hired 30 plus people to work for his businesses,” Turner wrote.

As reported in January, among Turner’s businesses is a Lexington entity called OBN Group LLC (assumed name Punchmade LLC). Business incorporation documents from the Kentucky Secretary of State show he also ran a record label called DevTakeFlightBeats Inc.

Turner’s lawsuit alleges that bank staff made disparaging remarks about him, suggesting the account was canceled because it would be unusual for a person like him to have that kind of money.

Incredibly, Turner acknowledges that PNC told him his account was flagged for attention from law enforcement officials.

“The PNC Bank customer service representative also explained that there was a note on the account that law enforcement would be contacted at some point in time,” the lawsuit reads.

“The Plaintiff, who was not worried at all about law enforcement being involved because nothing illegal occurred, informed the PNC Bank representative that this was one big mistake and asked him what his options were,” the complaint states.

Turner’s lawsuit said PNC told him they would put a note on his account allowing him to withdraw the funds from any branch, but that when he visited a PNC branch and asked to withdraw the entire amount in his account — $500,000 — PNC refused, saying the money had been seized.

“Ultimately, PNC bank not only refused his request to release his funds but informed him that his funds would be seized indefinitely as [sic] PNC Bank,” Turner lawsuit recounts.

The Punchmade shops selling financial data that were profiled in the January story are long gone, but Punchmade’s Instagram account now promotes punchmade[.]cc, which behaves and looks the same as his older shop.

The breach tracking service Constella Intelligence finds the email address associated with Turner’s enterprise OBN Group LLC — obndevpayments@gmail.com — was used by a Devon Turner from Lexington to purchase software online. That record includes the Lexington, Ky. mobile phone number 859-963-6243, which Constella also finds was used to register accounts for Devon Turner at the retailer Neiman Marcus, and at the home decor and fashion site poshmark.com.

A search on this phone number at DomainTools shows it is associated with two domain names since 2021. The first is the aforementioned punchmade[.]cc. The other is foreverpunchmade[.]com, which is registered to a Devon Turner in Lexington, Ky. A copy of this site at archive.org indicates it once sold Punchmade Dev-branded t-shirts and other merchandise.

Mr. Turner included his contact information at the bottom of his lawsuit. What phone number did he leave? Would you believe 859-963-6243?

Is Punchmade Dev a big-time cybercriminal enabler, as his public personna would have us believe? Or is he some two-bit nitwit who has spent so much on custom medallions that he can’t afford a lawyer? It’s hard to tell.

But he definitively has a broad reach: His Instagram account has ~860k followers, and his Telegram channel has more than 75,000 subscribers, all no doubt seeking that sweet “C@sh App sauce,” which apparently has something to do with moving cryptocurrencies through Cash App in a way that financially rewards people able and willing to open up new accounts.

It’s incredibly ironic that Punchmade sells tutorials on how to have great “opsec,” a reference to “operational security,” which in the cybercriminal context means the ability to successfully separate one’s cybercriminal identity from one’s real-life identity: This guy can’t even register a domain name anonymously.

A copy of Turner’s complaint is available here (PDF).

For more on Punchmade, check out the TikTok video How Punchmade Dev Got Started Scamming.

Update, Aug. 8, 8:49 a.m. ET: A reader pointed out that Turner also recently sued a Mercedes Benz dealership in Illinois, allegedly for selling him a lemon. In that pro se complaint, Turner included the contact email address punchmadedev@gmail.com.

Low-Drama ‘Dark Angels’ Reap Record Ransoms

A ransomware group called Dark Angels made headlines this past week when it was revealed the crime group recently received a record $75 million data ransom payment from a Fortune 50 company. Security experts say the Dark Angels have been around since 2021, but the group doesn’t get much press because they work alone and maintain a low profile, picking one target at a time and favoring mass data theft over disrupting the victim’s operations.

Security firm Zscaler ThreatLabz this month ranked Dark Angels as the top ransomware threat for 2024, noting that in early 2024 a victim paid the ransomware group $75 million — higher than any previously recorded ransom payment. ThreatLabz found Dark Angels has conducted some of the largest ransomware attacks to date, and yet little is known about the group.

Brett Stone-Gross, senior director of threat intelligence at ThreatLabz, said Dark Angels operate using an entirely different playbook than most other ransomware groups. For starters, he said, Dark Angels does not employ the typical ransomware affiliate model, which relies on hackers-for-hire to install malicious software that locks up infected systems.

“They really don’t want to be in the headlines or cause business disruptions,” Stone-Gross said. “They’re about making money and attracting as little attention as possible.”

Most ransomware groups maintain flashy victim leak sites which threaten to publish the target’s stolen data unless a ransom demand is paid. But the Dark Angels didn’t even have a victim shaming site until April 2023. And the leak site isn’t particularly well branded; it’s called Dunghill Leak.

“Nothing about them is flashy,” Stone-Gross said. “For the longest time, they didn’t even want to cause a big headline, but they probably felt compelled to create that leaks site because they wanted to show they were serious and that they were going to post victim data and make it accessible.”

Dark Angels is thought to be a Russia-based cybercrime syndicate whose distinguishing characteristic is stealing truly staggering amounts of data from major companies across multiple sectors, including healthcare, finance, government and education. For large businesses, the group has exfiltrated between 10-100 terabytes of data, which can take days or weeks to transfer, ThreatLabz found.

Like most ransom gangs, Dark Angels will publish data stolen from victims who do not pay. Some of the more notable victims listed on Dunghill Leak include the global food distribution firm Sysco, which disclosed a ransomware attack in May 2023; and the travel booking giant Sabre, which was hit by the Dark Angels in September 2023.

Stone-Gross said Dark Angels is often reluctant to deploy ransomware malware because such attacks work by locking up the target’s IT infrastructure, which typically causes the victim’s business to grind to a halt for days, weeks or even months on end. And those types of breaches tend to make headlines quickly.

“They selectively choose whether they want to deploy ransomware or not,” he said. “If they deem they can encrypt some files that won’t cause major disruptions — but will give them a ton of data — that’s what they’ll do. But really, what separates them from the rest is the volume of data they’re stealing. It’s a whole order of magnitude greater with Dark Angels. Companies losing vast amounts of data will pay these high ransoms.”

So who paid the record $75 million ransom? Bleeping Computer posited on July 30 that the victim was the pharmaceutical giant Cencora (formerly AmeriSourceBergen Corporation), which reported a data security incident to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on February 21, 2024.

The SEC requires publicly-traded companies to disclose a potentially material cybersecurity event within four days of the incident. Cencora is currently #10 on the Fortune 500 list, generating more than $262 billion in revenue last year.

Cencora did not respond to questions about whether it had made a ransom payment in connection with the February cybersecurity incident, and referred KrebsOnSecurity to expenses listed under “Other” in the restructuring section of their latest quarterly financial report (PDF). That report states that the majority of the $30 million cost in “Other” was associated with the breach.

Cencora’s quarterly statement said the incident affected a standalone legacy information technology platform in one country and the foreign business unit’s ability to operate in that country for approximately two weeks.

In its most recent State of Ransomware report (PDF), security firm Sophos found the average ransomware payment had increased fivefold in the past year, from $400,000 in 2023 to $2 million. Sophos says that in more than four-fifths (82%) of cases funding for the ransom came from multiple sources. Overall, 40% of total ransom funding came from the organizations themselves and 23% from insurance providers.

Further reading: ThreatLabz ransomware report (PDF).

Don’t Let Your Domain Name Become a “Sitting Duck”

More than a million domain names — including many registered by Fortune 100 firms and brand protection companies — are vulnerable to takeover by cybercriminals thanks to authentication weaknesses at a number of large web hosting providers and domain registrars, new research finds.

Your Web browser knows how to find a site like example.com thanks to the global Domain Name System (DNS), which serves as a kind of phone book for the Internet by translating human-friendly website names (example.com) into numeric Internet addresses.

When someone registers a domain name, the registrar will typically provide two sets of DNS records that the customer then needs to assign to their domain. Those records are crucial because they allow Web browsers to find the Internet address of the hosting provider that is serving that domain.

But potential problems can arise when a domain’s DNS records are “lame,” meaning the authoritative name server does not have enough information about the domain and can’t resolve queries to find it. A domain can become lame in a variety of ways, such as when it is not assigned an Internet address, or because the name servers in the domain’s authoritative record are misconfigured or missing.

The reason lame domains are problematic is that a number of Web hosting and DNS providers allow users to claim control over a domain without accessing the true owner’s account at their DNS provider or registrar.

If this threat sounds familiar, that’s because it is hardly new. Back in 2019, KrebsOnSecurity wrote about thieves employing this method to seize control over thousands of domains registered at GoDaddy, and using those to send bomb threats and sextortion emails (GoDaddy says they fixed that weakness in their systems not long after that 2019 story).

In the 2019 campaign, the spammers created accounts on GoDaddy and were able to take over vulnerable domains simply by registering a free account at GoDaddy and being assigned the same DNS servers as the hijacked domain.

Three years before that, the same pervasive weakness was described in a blog post by security researcher Matthew Bryant, who showed how one could commandeer at least 120,000 domains via DNS weaknesses at some of the world’s largest hosting providers.

Incredibly, new research jointly released today by security experts at Infoblox and Eclypsium finds this same authentication weakness is still present at a number of large hosting and DNS providers.

“It’s easy to exploit, very hard to detect, and it’s entirely preventable,” said Dave Mitchell, principal threat researcher at Infoblox. “Free services make it easier [to exploit] at scale. And the bulk of these are at a handful of DNS providers.”

SITTING DUCKS

Infoblox’s report found there are multiple cybercriminal groups abusing these stolen domains as a globally dispersed “traffic distribution system,” which can be used to mask the true source or destination of web traffic and to funnel Web users to malicious or phishous websites.

Commandeering domains this way also can allow thieves to impersonate trusted brands and abuse their positive or at least neutral reputation when sending email from those domains, as we saw in 2019 with the GoDaddy attacks.

“Hijacked domains have been used directly in phishing attacks and scams, as well as large spam systems,” reads the Infoblox report, which refers to lame domains as “Sitting Ducks.” “There is evidence that some domains were used for Cobalt Strike and other malware command and control (C2). Other attacks have used hijacked domains in targeted phishing attacks by creating lookalike subdomains. A few actors have stockpiled hijacked domains for an unknown purpose.”

Eclypsium researchers estimate there are currently about one million Sitting Duck domains, and that at least 30,000 of them have been hijacked for malicious use since 2019.

“As of the time of writing, numerous DNS providers enable this through weak or nonexistent verification of domain ownership for a given account,” Eclypsium wrote.

The security firms said they found a number of compromised Sitting Duck domains were originally registered by brand protection companies that specialize in defensive domain registrations (reserving look-alike domains for top brands before those names can be grabbed by scammers) and combating trademark infringement.

For example, Infoblox found cybercriminal groups using a Sitting Duck domain called clickermediacorp[.]com, which was a CBS Interactive Inc. domain initially registered in 2009 at GoDaddy. However, in 2010 the DNS was updated to DNSMadeEasy.com servers, and in 2012 the domain was transferred to MarkMonitor.

Another hijacked Sitting Duck domain — anti-phishing[.]org — was registered in 2003 by the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), a cybersecurity not-for-profit organization that closely tracks phishing attacks.

In many cases, the researchers discovered Sitting Duck domains that appear to have been configured to auto-renew at the registrar, but the authoritative DNS or hosting services were not renewed.

The researchers say Sitting Duck domains all possess three attributes that makes them vulnerable to takeover:

1) the domain uses or delegates authoritative DNS services to a different provider than the domain registrar;
2) the authoritative name server(s) for the domain does not have information about the Internet address the domain should point to;
3) the authoritative DNS provider is “exploitable,” i.e. an attacker can claim the domain at the provider and set up DNS records without access to the valid domain owner’s account at the domain registrar.

How does one know whether a DNS provider is exploitable? There is a frequently updated list published on GitHub called “Can I take over DNS,” which has been documenting exploitability by DNS provider over the past several years. The list includes examples for each of the named DNS providers.

In the case of the aforementioned Sitting Duck domain clickermediacorp[.]com, the domain appears to have been hijacked by scammers by claiming it at the web hosting firm DNSMadeEasy, which is owned by Digicert, one of the industry’s largest issuers of digital certificates (SSL/TLS certificates).

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, DNSMadeEasy founder and senior vice president Steve Job said the problem isn’t really his company’s to solve, noting that DNS providers who are also not domain registrars have no real way of validating whether a given customer legitimately owns the domain being claimed.

“We do shut down abusive accounts when we find them,” Job said. “But it’s my belief that the onus needs to be on the [domain registrants] themselves. If you’re going to buy something and point it somewhere you have no control over, we can’t prevent that.”

Infoblox, Eclypsium, and the DNS wiki listing at Github all say that web hosting giant Digital Ocean is among the vulnerable hosting firms. In response to questions, Digital Ocean said it was exploring options for mitigating such activity.

“The DigitalOcean DNS service is not authoritative, and we are not a domain registrar,” Digital Ocean wrote in an emailed response. “Where a domain owner has delegated authority to our DNS infrastructure with their registrar, and they have allowed their ownership of that DNS record in our infrastructure to lapse, that becomes a ‘lame delegation’ under this hijack model. We believe the root cause, ultimately, is poor management of domain name configuration by the owner, akin to leaving your keys in your unlocked car, but we acknowledge the opportunity to adjust our non-authoritative DNS service guardrails in an effort to help minimize the impact of a lapse in hygiene at the authoritative DNS level. We’re connected with the research teams to explore additional mitigation options.”

In a statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity, the hosting provider and registrar Hostinger said they were working to implement a solution to prevent lame duck attacks in the “upcoming weeks.”

“We are working on implementing an SOA-based domain verification system,” Hostinger wrote. “Custom nameservers with a Start of Authority (SOA) record will be used to verify whether the domain truly belongs to the customer. We aim to launch this user-friendly solution by the end of August. The final step is to deprecate preview domains, a functionality sometimes used by customers with malicious intents. Preview domains will be deprecated by the end of September. Legitimate users will be able to use randomly generated temporary subdomains instead.”

What did DNS providers that have struggled with this issue in the past do to address these authentication challenges? The security firms said that to claim a domain name, the best practice providers gave the account holder random name servers that required a change at the registrar before the domains could go live. They also found the best practice providers used various mechanisms to ensure that the newly assigned name server hosts did not match previous name server assignments.

[Side note: Infoblox observed that many of the hijacked domains were being hosted at Stark Industries Solutions, a sprawling hosting provider that appeared two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine and has become the epicenter of countless cyberattacks against enemies of Russia].

Both Infoblox and Eclypsium said that without more cooperation and less finger-pointing by all stakeholders in the global DNS, attacks on sitting duck domains will continue to rise, with domain registrants and regular Internet users caught in the middle.

“Government organizations, regulators, and standards bodies should consider long-term solutions to vulnerabilities in the DNS management attack surface,” the Infoblox report concludes.

Crooks Bypassed Google’s Email Verification to Create Workspace Accounts, Access 3rd-Party Services

Google says it recently fixed an authentication weakness that allowed crooks to circumvent the email verification required to create a Google Workspace account, and leverage that to impersonate a domain holder at third-party services that allow logins through Google’s “Sign in with Google” feature.

Last week, KrebsOnSecurity heard from a reader who said they received a notice that their email address had been used to create a potentially malicious Workspace account that Google had blocked.

“In the last few weeks, we identified a small-scale abuse campaign whereby bad actors circumvented the email verification step in our account creation flow for Email Verified (EV) Google Workspace accounts using a specially constructed request,” the notice from Google read. “These EV users could then be used to gain access to third-party applications using ‘Sign In with Google’.”

In response to questions, Google said it fixed the problem within 72 hours of discovering it, and that the company has added additional detection to protect against these types of authentication bypasses going forward.

Anu Yamunan, director of abuse and safety protections at Google Workspace, told KrebsOnSecurity the malicious activity began in late June, and involved “a few thousand” Workspace accounts that were created without being domain-verified.

Google Workspace offers a free trial that people can use to access services like Google Docs, but other services such as Gmail are only available to Workspace users who can validate control over the domain name associated with their email address. The weakness Google fixed allowed attackers to bypass this validation process. Google emphasized that none of the affected domains had previously been associated with Workspace accounts or services.

“The tactic here was to create a specifically-constructed request by a bad actor to circumvent email verification during the signup process,” Yamunan said. “The vector here is they would use one email address to try to sign in, and a completely different email address to verify a token. Once they were email verified, in some cases we have seen them access third party services using Google single sign-on.”

Yamunan said none of the potentially malicious workspace accounts were used to abuse Google services, but rather the attackers sought to impersonate the domain holder to other services online.

In the case of the reader who shared the breach notice from Google, the imposters used the authentication bypass to associate his domain with a Workspace account. And that domain was tied to his login at several third-party services online. Indeed, the alert this reader received from Google said the unauthorized Workspace account appears to have been used to sign in to his account at Dropbox.

Google said the now-fixed authentication bypass is unrelated to a recent issue involving cryptocurrency-based domain names that were apparently compromised in their transition to Squarespace, which last year acquired more than 10 million domains that were registered via Google Domains.

On July 12, a number of domains tied to cryptocurrency businesses were hijacked from Squarespace users who hadn’t yet set up their Squarespace accounts. Squarespace has since published a statement blaming the domain hijacks on “a weakness related to OAuth logins”, which Squarespace said it fixed within hours.

Phish-Friendly Domain Registry “.top” Put on Notice

The Chinese company in charge of handing out domain names ending in “.top” has been given until mid-August 2024 to show that it has put in place systems for managing phishing reports and suspending abusive domains, or else forfeit its license to sell domains. The warning comes amid the release of new findings that .top was the most common suffix in phishing websites over the past year, second only to domains ending in “.com.”

On July 16, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) sent a letter to the owners of the .top domain registry. ICANN has filed hundreds of enforcement actions against domain registrars over the years, but in this case ICANN singled out a domain registry responsible for maintaining an entire top-level domain (TLD).

Among other reasons, the missive chided the registry for failing to respond to reports about phishing attacks involving .top domains.

“Based on the information and records gathered through several weeks, it was determined that .TOP Registry does not have a process in place to promptly, comprehensively, and reasonably investigate and act on reports of DNS Abuse,” the ICANN letter reads (PDF).

ICANN’s warning redacted the name of the recipient, but records show the .top registry is operated by a Chinese entity called Jiangsu Bangning Science & Technology Co. Ltd. Representatives for the company have not responded to requests for comment.

Domains ending in .top were represented prominently in a new phishing report released today by the Interisle Consulting Group, which sources phishing data from several places, including the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), OpenPhish, PhishTank, and Spamhaus.

Interisle’s newest study examined nearly two million phishing attacks in the last year, and found that phishing sites accounted for more than four percent of all new .top domains between May 2023 and April 2024. Interisle said .top has roughly 2.76 million domains in its stable, and that more than 117,000 of those were phishing sites in the past year.

ICANN said its review was based on information collected and studied about .top domains over the past few weeks. But the fact that high volumes of phishing sites are being registered through Jiangsu Bangning Science & Technology Co Ltd. is hardly a new trend.

For example, more than 10 years ago the same Chinese registrar was the fourth most common source of phishing websites, as tracked by the APWG. Bear in mind that the APWG report excerpted below was published more than a year before Jiangsu Bangning received ICANN approval to introduce and administer the new .top registry.

A fascinating new wrinkle in the phishing landscape is the growth in scam pages hosted via the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a decentralized data storage and delivery network that is based on peer-to-peer networking. According to Interisle, the use of IPFS to host and launch phishing attacks — which can make phishing sites more difficult to take down — increased a staggering 1,300 percent, to roughly 19,000 phishing sites reported in the last year.

Last year’s report from Interisle found that domain names ending in “.us” — the top-level domain for the United States — were among the most prevalent in phishing scams. While .us domains are not even on the Top 20 list of this year’s study, “.com” maintained its perennial #1 spot as the largest source of phishing domains overall.

A year ago, the phishiest domain registrar by far was Freenom, a now-defunct registrar that handed out free domains in several country-code TLDs, including .tk, .ml, .ga and .cf. Freenom went out of business after being sued by Meta, which alleged Freenom ignored abuse complaints while monetizing traffic to abusive domains.

Following Freenom’s demise, phishers quickly migrated to other new low-cost TLDs and to services that allow anonymous, free domain registrations — particularly subdomain services. For example, Interisle found phishing attacks involving websites created on Google’s blogspot.com skyrocketed last year more than 230 percent. Other subdomain services that saw a substantial growth in domains registered by phishers include weebly.com, github.io, wix.com, and ChangeIP, the report notes.

Interisle Consulting partner Dave Piscitello said ICANN could easily send similar warning letters to at least a half-dozen other top-level domain registries, noting that spammers and phishers tend to cycle through the same TLDs periodically — including .xyz, .info, .support and .lol, all of which saw considerably more business from phishers after Freenom’s implosion.

Piscitello said domain registrars and registries could significantly reduce the number of phishing sites registered through their services just by flagging customers who try to register huge volumes of domains at once. Their study found that at least 27% of the domains used for phishing were registered in bulk — i.e. the same registrant paid for hundreds or thousands of domains in quick succession.

The report includes a case study in which a phisher this year registered 17,562 domains over the course of an eight-hour period — roughly 38 domains per minute — using .lol domains that were all composed of random letters.

ICANN tries to resolve contract disputes privately with the registry and registrar community, and experts say the nonprofit organization usually only publishes enforcement letters when the recipient is ignoring its private notices. Indeed, ICANN’s letter notes Jiangsu Bangning didn’t even open its emailed notifications. It also cited the registry for falling behind in its ICANN membership fees.

With that in mind, a review of ICANN’s public enforcement activity suggests two trends: One is that there have been far fewer public compliance and enforcement actions in recent years — even as the number of new TLDs has expanded dramatically.

The second is that in a majority of cases, the failure of a registry or registrar to pay its annual ICANN membership fees was cited as a reason for a warning letter. A review of nearly two dozen enforcement letters ICANN has sent to domain registrars since 2022 shows that failure to pay dues was cited as a reason (or the reason) for the violation at least 75 percent of the time.

Piscitello, a former vice president of security at ICANN, said nearly all breach notices sent out while he was at ICANN were because the registrar owed money.

“I think the rest is just lipstick to suggest that ICANN’s on top of DNS Abuse,” Piscitello said.

KrebsOnSecurity has sought comment from ICANN and will update this story if they respond.

ICANN said most of its investigations are resolved and closed through the initial informal resolution stage, and that hundreds of enforcement cases are initiated during this stage with the contracted parties who are required to demonstrate compliance, become compliant, and/or present and implement remediation plans to prevent the recurrence of those enforcement issues.

“It is important to take into account that, prior to issuing any notice of breach to a registrar or registry operator, ICANN Compliance conducts an overall contractual compliance ‘health check’ of the relevant contracted party,” ICANN said in a written response to questions. “During this check, ICANN Compliance proactively reviews the contracted party’s compliance with obligations across the agreements and policies. Any additional contractual violation found during these checks is added to the Notice of Breach. It is not uncommon for parties who failed to comply with contractual obligations (whether they are related to DNS Abuse, RDDS, or others) to also be in arrears with ICANN fees.”

Update, 11:49 p.m. ET: Added statement from ICANN. Clarified Piscitello’s former role at ICANN.

Global Microsoft Meltdown Tied to Bad Crowdstrike Update

A faulty software update from cybersecurity vendor Crowdstrike crippled countless Microsoft Windows computers across the globe today, disrupting everything from airline travel and financial institutions to hospitals and businesses online. Crowdstrike said a fix has been deployed, but experts say the recovery from this outage could take some time, as Crowdstrike’s solution needs to be applied manually on a per-machine basis.

Earlier today, an errant update shipped by Crowdstrike began causing Windows machines running the software to display the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death,” rendering those systems temporarily unusable. Like most security software, Crowdstrike requires deep hooks into the Windows operating system to fend off digital intruders, and in that environment a tiny coding error can quickly lead to catastrophic outcomes.

In a post on Twitter/X, Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz said an update to correct the coding mistake has been shipped, and that Mac and Linux systems are not affected.

“This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” Kurtz said on Twitter, echoing a written statement by Crowdstrike. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”

Posting to Twitter/X, the director of Crowdstrike’s threat hunting operations said the fix involves booting Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE), deleting the file “C-00000291*.sys” and then restarting the machine.

The software snafu may have been compounded by a recent series of outages involving Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, The New York Times reports, although it remains unclear whether those Azure problems are at all related to the bad Crowdstrike update. Update, 4:03 p.m. ET: Microsoft reports the Azure problems today were unrelated to the bad Crowdstrike update.

Matt Burgess at Wired writes that within health care and emergency services, various medical providers around the world have reported issues with their Windows-linked systems, sharing news on social media or their own websites.

“The US Emergency Alert System, which issues hurricane warnings, said that there had been various 911 outages in a number of states,” Burgess wrote. “Germany’s University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein said it was canceling some nonurgent surgeries at two locations. In Israel, more than a dozen hospitals have been impacted, as well as pharmacies, with reports saying ambulances have been rerouted to nonimpacted medical organizations.”

In the United Kingdom, NHS England has confirmed that appointment and patient record systems have been impacted by the outages.

“One hospital has declared a ‘critical’ incident after a third-party IT system it used was impacted,” Wired reports. “Also in the country, train operators have said there are delays across the network, with multiple companies being impacted.”

Reactions to today’s outage were swift and brutal on social media, which was flooded with images of people at airports surrounded by computer screens displaying the Microsoft blue screen error. Many Twitter/X users chided the Crowdstrike CEO for failing to apologize for the massively disruptive event, while others noted that doing so could expose the company to lawsuits.

Meanwhile, the international Windows outage quickly became the most talked-about subject on Twitter/X, whose artificial intelligence bots collated a series of parody posts from cybersecurity professionals pretending to be on their first week of work at Crowdstrike. Incredibly,Twitter/X’s AI summarized these sarcastic posts into a sunny, can-do story about Crowdstrike that was promoted as the top discussion on Twitter this morning.

“Several individuals have recently started working at the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike and have expressed their excitement and pride in their new roles,” the AI summary read. “They have shared their experiences of pushing code to production on their first day and are looking forward to positive outcomes in their work.”

This is an evolving story. Stay tuned for updates.

Researchers: Weak Security Defaults Enabled Squarespace Domains Hijacks

At least a dozen organizations with domain names at domain registrar Squarespace saw their websites hijacked last week. Squarespace bought all assets of Google Domains a year ago, but many customers still haven’t set up their new accounts. Experts say malicious hackers learned they could commandeer any migrated Squarespace accounts that hadn’t yet been registered, merely by supplying an email address tied to an existing domain.

The Squarespace domain hijacks, which took place between July 9 and July 12, appear to have mostly targeted cryptocurrency businesses, including Celer Network, Compound Finance, Pendle Finance, and Unstoppable Domains. In some cases, the attackers were able to redirect the hijacked domains to phishing sites set up to steal visitors’ cryptocurrency funds.

New York City-based Squarespace purchased roughly 10 million domain names from Google Domains in June 2023, and it has been gradually migrating those domains to its service ever since. Squarespace has not responded to a request for comment, nor has it issued a statement about the attacks.

But an analysis released by security experts at Metamask and Paradigm finds the most likely explanation for what happened is that Squarespace assumed all users migrating from Google Domains would select the social login options — such “Continue with Google” or “Continue with Apple” — as opposed to the “Continue with email” choice.

Taylor Monahan, lead product manager at Metamask, said Squarespace never accounted for the possibility that a threat actor might sign up for an account using an email associated with a recently-migrated domain before the legitimate email holder created the account themselves.

“Thus nothing actually stops them from trying to login with an email,” Monahan told KrebsOnSecurity. “And since there’s no password on the account, it just shoots them to the ‘create password for your new account’ flow. And since the account is half-initialized on the backend, they now have access to the domain in question.”

What’s more, Monahan said, Squarespace did not require email verification for new accounts created with a password.

“The domains being migrated from Google to Squarespace are known,” Monahan said. “It’s either public or easily discernible info which email addresses have admin of a domain. And if that email never sets up their account on Squarespace — say because the billing admin left the company five years ago or folks just ignored the email — anyone who enters that email@domain in the squarespace form now has full access to control to the domain.”

The researchers say some Squarespace domains that were migrated over also could be hijacked if attackers discovered the email addresses for less privileged user accounts tied to the domain, such as “domain manager,” which likewise has the ability to transfer a domain or point it to a different Internet address.

Monahan said the migration has left domain owners with fewer options to secure and monitor their accounts.

“Squarespace can’t support users who need any control or insight into the activity being performed in their account or domain,” Monahan said. “You basically have no control over the access different folks have. You don’t have any audit logs. You don’t get email notifications for some actions. The owner doesn’t get email notification for actions taken by a ‘domain manager.’ This is absolutely insane if you’re used to and expecting the controls Google provides.”

The researchers have published a comprehensive guide for locking down Squarespace user accounts, which urges Squarespace users to enable multi-factor authentication (disabled during the migration).

“Determining what emails have access to your new Squarespace account is step 1,” the help guide advises. “Most teams DO NOT REALIZE these accounts even exist, let alone theoretically have access.”

The guide also recommends removing unnecessary Squarespace user accounts, and disabling reseller access in Google Workspace.

“If you bought Google Workspace via Google Domains, Squarespace is now your authorized reseller,” the help document explains. “This means that anyone with access to your Squarespace account also has a backdoor into your Google Workspace unless you explicitly disable it by following the instructions here, which you should do. It’s easier to secure one account than two.”

Update, July 23, 1:50 p.m. ET: Squarespace has published a post-mortem about the incident. Their statement blames the domain hijacks on “a weakness related to OAuth logins”, which Squarespace said it fixed within hours, and contradicts the findings presented by the researchers above. Here are the relevant bits from their statement:

“During this incident, all compromised accounts were using third-party OAuth. Neither Squarespace nor any third-party authentication provider made any changes to authentication as part of our migration of Google Domains to Squarespace. To be clear, the migration of domains involved no changes to multi-factor authentication before, during or after.”

“To date there is no evidence that Google Workspace accounts were or are at risk, and we have received no customer reports to this effect. As a reseller, Squarespace manages billing but customers access Workspace directly using their Google account.”

“Our analysis shows no evidence that Squarespace accounts using an email-based login with an unverified email address were involved with this attack.”

Crooks Steal Phone, SMS Records for Nearly All AT&T Customers

AT&T Corp. disclosed today that a new data breach has exposed phone call and text message records for roughly 110 million people — nearly all of its customers. AT&T said it delayed disclosing the incident in response to “national security and public safety concerns,” noting that some of the records included data that could be used to determine where a call was made or text message sent. AT&T also acknowledged the customer records were exposed in a cloud database that was protected only by a username and password (no multi-factor authentication needed).

In a regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today, AT&T said cyber intruders accessed an AT&T workspace on a third-party cloud platform in April, downloading files containing customer call and text interactions between May 1 and October 31, 2022, as well as on January 2, 2023.

The company said the stolen data includes records of calls and texts for mobile providers that resell AT&T’s service, but that it does not include the content of calls or texts, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, or any other personally identifiable information.

However, the company said a subset of stolen records included information about the location of cellular communications towers closest to the subscriber, data that could be used to determine the approximate location of the customer device initiating or receiving those text messages or phone calls.

“While the data does not include customer names, there are often ways, using publicly available online tools, to find the name associated with a specific telephone number,” AT&T allowed.

AT&T’s said it learned of the breach on April 19, but delayed disclosing it at the request of federal investigators. The company’s SEC disclosure says at least one individual has been detained by the authorities in connection with the breach.

In a written statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity, the FBI confirmed that it asked AT&T to delay notifying affected customers.

“Shortly after identifying a potential breach to customer data and before making its materiality decision, AT&T contacted the FBI to report the incident,” the FBI statement reads. “In assessing the nature of the breach, all parties discussed a potential delay to public reporting under Item 1.05(c) of the SEC Rule, due to potential risks to national security and/or public safety. AT&T, FBI, and DOJ worked collaboratively through the first and second delay process, all while sharing key threat intelligence to bolster FBI investigative equities and to assist AT&T’s incident response work.”

Techcrunch quoted an AT&T spokesperson saying the customer data was stolen as a result of a still-unfolding data breach involving more than 160 customers of the cloud data provider Snowflake.

Earlier this year, malicious hackers figured out that many major companies have uploaded massive amounts of valuable and sensitive customer data to Snowflake servers, all the while protecting those Snowflake accounts with little more than a username and password.

Wired reported last month how the hackers behind the Snowflake data thefts purchased stolen Snowflake credentials from dark web services that sell access to usernames, passwords and authentication tokens that are siphoned by information-stealing malware. For its part, Snowflake says it now requires all new customers to use multi-factor authentication.

Other companies with millions of customer records stolen from Snowflake servers include Advance Auto Parts, Allstate, Anheuser-Busch, Los Angeles Unified, Mitsubishi, Neiman Marcus, Pure Storage, Santander Bank, State Farm, and Ticketmaster.

Earlier this year, AT&T reset passwords for millions of customers after the company finally acknowledged a data breach from 2018 involving approximately 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and roughly 65.4 million former account holders.

Mark Burnett is an application security architect, consultant and author. Burnett said the only real use for the data stolen in the most recent AT&T breach is to know who is contacting whom and how many times.

“The most concerning thing to me about this AT&T breach of ALL customer call and text records is that this isn’t one of their main databases; it is metadata on who is contacting who,” Burnett wrote on Mastodon. “Which makes me wonder what would call logs without timestamps or names have been used for.”

It remains unclear why so many major corporations persist in the belief that it is somehow acceptable to store so much sensitive customer data with so few security protections. For example, Advance Auto Parts said the data exposed included full names, Social Security numbers, drivers licenses and government issued ID numbers on 2.3 million people who were former employees or job applicants.

That may be because, apart from the class-action lawsuits that invariably ensue after these breaches, there is little holding companies accountable for sloppy security practices. AT&T told the SEC it does not believe this incident is likely to materially impact AT&T’s financial condition or results of operations. AT&T reported revenues of more than $30 billion in its most recent quarter.

KrebsOnSecurity Threatened with Defamation Lawsuit Over Fake Radaris CEO

On March 8, 2024, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive on the consumer data broker Radaris, showing how the original owners are two men in Massachusetts who operated multiple Russian language dating services and affiliate programs, in addition to a dizzying array of people-search websites. The subjects of that piece are threatening to sue KrebsOnSecurity for defamation unless the story is retracted. Meanwhile, their attorney has admitted that the person Radaris named as the CEO from its inception is a fabricated identity.

Radaris is just one cog in a sprawling network of people-search properties online that sell highly detailed background reports on U.S. consumers and businesses. Those reports typically include the subject’s current and previous addresses, partial Social Security numbers, any known licenses, email addresses and phone numbers, as well as the same information for any of their immediate relatives.

Radaris has a less-than-stellar reputation when it comes to responding to consumers seeking to have their reports removed from its various people-search services. That poor reputation, combined with indications that the true founders of Radaris have gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal their stewardship of the company, was what prompted KrebsOnSecurity to investigate the origins of Radaris in the first place.

On April 18, KrebsOnSecurity received a certified letter (PDF) from Valentin “Val” Gurvits, an attorney with the Boston Law Group, stating that KrebsOnSecurity would face a withering defamation lawsuit unless the Radaris story was immediately retracted and an apology issued to the two brothers named in the story as co-founders.

That March story worked backwards from the email address used to register radaris.com, and charted an impressive array of data broker companies created over the past 15 years by Massachusetts residents Dmitry and Igor Lubarsky (also sometimes spelled Lybarsky or Lubarski). Dmitry goes by “Dan,” and Igor uses the name “Gary.”

Those businesses included numerous websites marketed to Russian-speaking people who are new to the United States, such as russianamerica.com, newyork.ru, russiancleveland.com, russianla.com, russianmiami.com, etc. Other domains connected to the Lubarskys included Russian-language dating and adult websites, as well as affiliate programs for their international calling card businesses.

The story on Radaris noted that the Lubarsky brothers registered most of their businesses using a made-up name — “Gary Norden,” sometimes called Gary Nord or Gary Nard.

Mr. Gurvits’ letter stated emphatically that my reporting was lazy, mean-spirited, and obviously intended to smear the reputation of his clients. By way of example, Mr. Gurvits said the Lubarskys were actually Ukrainian, and that the story painted his clients in a negative light by insinuating that they were somehow associated with Radaris and with vaguely nefarious elements in Russia.

But more to the point, Mr. Gurvits said, neither of his clients were Gary Norden, and neither had ever held any leadership positions at Radaris, nor were they financial beneficiaries of the company in any way.

“Neither of my clients is a founder of Radaris, and neither of my clients is the CEOs of Radaris,” Gurvits wrote. “Additionally, presently and going back at least the past 10 years, neither of my clients are (or were) officers or employees of Radaris. Indeed, neither of them even owns (or ever owned) any equity in Radaris. In intentional disregard of these facts, the Article implies that my clients are personally responsible for Radaris’ actions. Therefore, you intentionally caused all negative allegations in the Article made with respect to Radaris to be imputed against my clients personally.”

We took Mr. Gurvits’ word on the ethnicity of his clients, and adjusted the story to remove a single mention that they were Russian. We did so even though Dan Lubarsky’s own Facebook page said (until recently) that he was from Moscow, Russia.

KrebsOnSecurity asked Mr. Gurvits to explain precisely which other details in the story were incorrect, and replied that we would be happy to update the story with a correction if they could demonstrate any errors of fact or omission.

We also requested specifics about several aspects of the story, such as the identity of the current Radaris CEO — listed on the Radaris website as “Victor K.” Mr. Gurvits replied that Radaris is and always has been based in Ukraine, and that the company’s true founder “Eugene L” is based there.

While Radaris has claimed to have offices in Massachusetts, Cyprus and Latvia, its website has never mentioned Ukraine. Mr. Gurvits has not responded to requests for more information about the identities of “Eugene L” or “Victor K.”

Gurvits said he had no intention of doing anyone’s reporting for them, and that the Lubarskys were going to sue KrebsOnSecurity for defamation unless the story was retracted in full. KrebsOnSecurity replied that journalists often face challenges to things that they report, but it is more than rare for one who makes a challenge to take umbrage at being asked for supporting information.

On June 13, Mr. Gurvits sent another letter (PDF) that continued to claim KrebsOnSecurity was defaming his clients, only this time Gurvits said his clients would be satisfied if KrebsOnSecurity just removed their names from the story.

“Ultimately, my clients don’t care what you say about any of the websites or corporate entities in your Article, as long as you completely remove my clients’ names from the Article and cooperate with my clients to have copies of the Article where my clients’ names appear removed from the Internet,” Mr. Gurvits wrote.

MEET THE FAKE RADARIS CEO

The June 13 letter explained that the name Gary Norden was a pseudonym invented by the Radaris marketing division, but that neither of the Lubarsky brothers were Norden.

This was a startling admission, given that Radaris has quoted the fictitious Gary Norden in press releases published and paid for by Radaris, and in news media stories where the company is explicitly seeking money from investors. In other words, Radaris has been misrepresenting itself to investors from the beginning. Here’s a press release from Radaris that was published on PR Newswire in April 2011:

In April 2014, the Boston Business Journal published a story (PDF) about Radaris that extolled the company’s rapid growth and considerable customer base. The story noted that, “to date, the company has raised less than $1 million from Cyprus-based investment company Difive.”

“We live in a world where information becomes much more broad and much more available every single day,” the Boston Business Journal quoted Radaris’ fake CEO Gary Norden, who by then had somehow been demoted from CEO to vice president of business development.

“We decided there needs to be a service that allows for ease of monitoring of information about people,” the fake CEO said. The story went on to say Radaris was seeking to raise between $5 million and $7 million from investors in the ensuing months.

THE BIG LUBARSKY

In his most recent demand letter, Mr. Gurvits helpfully included resumes for both of the Lubarsky brothers.

Dmitry Lubarsky’s resume states he is the owner of Difive.com, a startup incubator for IT companies. Recall that Difive is the same company mentioned by the fake Radaris CEO in the 2014 Boston Business Journal story, which said Difive was the company’s initial and sole investor.

Difive’s website in 2016 said it had offices in Boston, New York, San Francisco, Riga (Latvia) and Moscow (nothing in Ukraine). Meanwhile, DomainTools.com reports difive.com was originally registered in 2007 to the fictitious Gary Norden from Massachusetts.

Archived copies of the Difive website from 2017 include a “Portfolio” page indexing all of the companies in which Difive has invested. That list, available here, includes virtually every “Gary Norden” domain name mentioned in my original report, plus a few that escaped notice earlier.

Dan Lubarsky’s resume says he was CEO of a people search company called HumanBook. The Wayback machine at archive.org shows the Humanbook domain (humanbook.com) came online around April 2008, when the company was still in “beta” mode.

By August 2008, however, humanbook.com had changed the name advertised on its homepage to Radaris Beta. Eventually, Humanbook simply redirected to radaris.com.

Astute readers may notice that the domain radaris.com is not among the companies listed as Difive investments. However, passive domain name system (DNS) records from DomainTools show that between October 2023 and March 2024 radaris.com was hosted alongside all of the other Gary Norden domains at the Internet address range 38.111.228.x.

That address range simultaneously hosted every domain mentioned in this story and in the original March 2024 report as connected to email addresses used by Gary Norden, including radaris.com, radaris.ru, radaris.de, difive.com, privet.ru, blog.ru, comfi.com, phoneowner.com, russianamerica.com, eprofit.com, rehold.com, homeflock.com, humanbook.com and dozens more. A spreadsheet of those historical DNS entries for radaris.com is available here (.csv).

The breach tracking service Constella Intelligence finds just two email addresses ending in difive.com have been exposed in data breaches over the years: dan@difive.com, and gn@difive.com. Presumably, “gn” stands for Gary Norden.

A search on the email address gn@difive.com via the breach tracking service osint.industries reveals this address was used to create an account at Airbnb under the name Gary, with the last four digits of the account’s phone number ending in “0001.”

Constella Intelligence finds gn@difive.com was associated with the Massachusetts number 617-794-0001, which was used to register accounts for “Igor Lybarsky” from Wellesley or Sherborn, Ma. at multiple online businesses, including audiusa.com and the designer eyewear store luxottica.com.

The phone number 617-794-0001 also appears for a “Gary Nard” user at russianamerica.com. Igor Lubarsky’s resume says he was the manager of russianamerica.com.

DomainTools finds 617-794-0001 is connected to registration records for three domains, including paytone.com, a domain that Dan Lubarsky’s resume says he managed. DomainTools also found that number on the registration records for trustoria.com, another major consumer data broker that has an atrocious reputation, according to the Better Business Bureau.

Dan Lubarsky’s resume says he was responsible for several international telecommunications services, including the website comfi.com. DomainTools says the phone number connected to that domain — 617-952-4234 — was also used on the registration records for humanbook.net/biz/info/mobi/us, as well as for radaris.me, radaris.in, and radaris.tel.

Two other key domains are connected to that phone number. The first is barsky.com, which is the website for Barsky Estate Realty Trust (PDF), a real estate holding company controlled by the Lubarskys. Naturally, DomainTools finds barsky.com also was registered to a Gary Norden from Massachusetts. But the organization listed in the barsky.com registration records is Comfi Inc., a VOIP communications firm that Dan Lubarsky’s resume says he managed.

The other domain of note is unipointtechnologies.com. Dan Lubarsky’s resume says he was the CEO of Wellesley Hills, Mass-based Unipoint Technology Inc. In 2012, Unipoint was fined $179,000 by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which said the company had failed to apply for a license to provide international telecommunications services.

A pandemic assistance loan granted in 2020 to Igor Lybarsky of Sherborn, Ma. shows he received the money to an entity called Norden Consulting.

PATENTLY REMARKABLE

The 2011 Radaris press release quoting their fake CEO Gary Norden said the company had four patents pending from a team of computer science PhDs. According to the resume shared by Mr. Gurvits, Dan Lubarsky has a PhD in computer science.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) says Dan Lubarsky/Lubarski has at least nine technology patents to his name. The fake CEO press release from Radaris mentioning its four patents was published in April 2011. By that time, the PTO says Dan Lubarsky had applied for exactly four patents, including, “System and Method for a Web-Based People Directory.” The first of those patents, published in 2009, is tied to Humanbook.com, the company Dan Lubarsky founded that later changed its name to Radaris.

If the Lubarskys were never involved in Radaris, how do they or their attorney know the inside information that Gary Norden is a fiction of Radaris’ marketing department? KrebsOnSecurity has learned that Mr. Gurvits is the same attorney responding on behalf of Radaris in a lawsuit against the data broker filed earlier this year by Atlas Data Privacy.

Mr. Gurvits also stepped forward as Radaris’ attorney in a class action lawsuit the company lost in 2017 because it never contested the claim in court. When the plaintiffs told the judge they couldn’t collect on the $7.5 million default judgment, the judge ordered the domain registry Verisign to transfer the radaris.com domain name to the plaintiffs.

Mr. Gurvits appealed the verdict, arguing that the lawsuit hadn’t named the actual owners of the Radaris domain name — a Cyprus company called Bitseller Expert Limited — and thus taking the domain away would be a violation of their due process rights.

The judge ruled in Radaris’ favor — halting the domain transfer — and told the plaintiffs they could refile their complaint. Soon after, the operator of Radaris changed from Bitseller to Andtop Company, an entity formed (PDF) in the Marshall Islands in Oct. 2020. Andtop also operates the aforementioned people-search service Trustoria.

Mr. Gurvits’ most-publicized defamation case was a client named Aleksej Gubarev, a Russian technology executive whose name appeared in the Steele Dossier. That document included a collection of salacious, unverified information gathered by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign at the direction of former president Donald Trump’s political rivals.

Gubarev, the head of the IT services company XBT Holding and the Florida web hosting firm Webzilla, sued BuzzFeed for publishing the Steele dossier. One of the items in the dossier alleged that XBT/Webzilla and affiliated companies played a key role in the hack of Democratic Party computers in the spring of 2016. The memo alleged Gubarev had been coerced into providing services to Russia’s main domestic security agency, known as the FSB.

In December 2018, a federal judge in Miami ruled in favor of BuzzFeed, saying the publication was protected by the fair report privilege, which gives news organizations latitude in reporting on official government proceedings.

Radaris was originally operated by Bitseller Expert Limited. Who owns Bitseller Expert Limited? A report (PDF) obtained from the Cyprus business registry shows this company lists its director as Pavel Kaydash from Moscow. Mr. Kaydash could not be reached for comment.

Stark Industries Solutions: An Iron Hammer in the Cloud

Two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, a large, mysterious new Internet hosting firm called Stark Industries Solutions materialized and quickly became the epicenter of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on government and commercial targets in Ukraine and Europe. An investigation into Stark Industries reveals it is being used as a global proxy network that conceals the true source of cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns against enemies of Russia.

At least a dozen patriotic Russian hacking groups have been launching DDoS attacks since the start of the war at a variety of targets seen as opposed to Moscow. But by all accounts, few attacks from those gangs have come close to the amount of firepower wielded by a pro-Russia group calling itself “NoName057(16).”

As detailed by researchers at Radware, NoName has effectively gamified DDoS attacks, recruiting hacktivists via its Telegram channel and offering to pay people who agree to install a piece of software called DDoSia. That program allows NoName to commandeer the host computers and their Internet connections in coordinated DDoS campaigns, and DDoSia users with the most attacks can win cash prizes.

A report from the security firm Team Cymru found the DDoS attack infrastructure used in NoName campaigns is assigned to two interlinked hosting providers: MIRhosting and Stark Industries. MIRhosting is a hosting provider founded in The Netherlands in 2004. But Stark Industries Solutions Ltd was incorporated on February 10, 2022, just two weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

PROXY WARS

Security experts say that not long after the war started, Stark began hosting dozens of proxy services and free virtual private networking (VPN) services, which are designed to help users shield their Internet usage and location from prying eyes.

Proxy providers allow users to route their Internet and Web browsing traffic through someone else’s computer. From a website’s perspective, the traffic from a proxy network user appears to originate from the rented IP address, not from the proxy service customer.

These services can be used in a legitimate manner for several business purposes — such as price comparisons or sales intelligence — but they are also massively abused for hiding cybercrime activity because they can make it difficult to trace malicious traffic to its original source.

What’s more, many proxy services do not disclose how they obtain access to the proxies they are renting out, and in many cases the access is obtained through the dissemination of malicious software that turns the infected system into a traffic relay — usually unbeknownst to the legitimate owner of the Internet connection. Other proxy services will allow users to make money by renting out their Internet connection to anyone.

Spur.us is a company that tracks VPNs and proxy services worldwide. Spur finds that Stark Industries (AS44477) currently is home to at least 74 VPN services, and 40 different proxy services. As we’ll see in the final section of this story, just one of those proxy networks has over a million Internet addresses available for rent across the globe.

Raymond Dijkxhoorn operates a hosting firm in The Netherlands called Prolocation. He also co-runs SURBL, an anti-abuse service that flags domains and Internet address ranges that are strongly associated with spam and cybercrime activity, including DDoS.

Dijkxhoorn said last year SURBL heard from multiple people who said they operated VPN services whose web resources were included in SURBL’s block lists.

“We had people doing delistings at SURBL for domain names that were suspended by the registrars,” Dijkhoorn told KrebsOnSecurity. “And at least two of them explained that Stark offered them free VPN services that they were reselling.”

Dijkxhoorn added that Stark Industries also sponsored activist groups from Ukraine.

“How valuable would it be for Russia to know the real IPs from Ukraine’s tech warriors?” he observed.

CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF BULLETS

Richard Hummel is threat intelligence lead at NETSCOUT. Hummel said when he considers the worst of all the hosting providers out there today, Stark Industries is consistently near or at the top of that list.

“The reason is we’ve had at least a dozen service providers come to us saying, ‘There’s this network out there inundating us with traffic,'” Hummel said. “And it wasn’t even DDoS attacks. [The systems] on Stark were just scanning these providers so fast it was crashing some of their services.”

Hummel said NoName will typically launch their attacks using a mix of resources rented from major, legitimate cloud services, and those from so-called “bulletproof” hosting providers like Stark. Bulletproof providers are so named when they earn or cultivate a reputation for ignoring any abuse complaints or police reports about activity on their networks.

Combining bulletproof providers with legitimate cloud hosting, Hummel said, likely makes NoName’s DDoS campaigns more resilient because many network operators will hesitate to be too aggressive in blocking Internet addresses associated with the major cloud services.

“What we typically see here is a distribution of cloud hosting providers and bulletproof hosting providers in DDoS attacks,” he said. “They’re using public cloud hosting providers because a lot of times that’s your first layer of network defense, and because [many companies are wary of] over-blocking access to legitimate cloud resources.”

But even if the cloud provider detects abuse coming from the customer, the provider is probably not going to shut the customer down immediately, Hummel said.

“There is usually a grace period, and even if that’s only an hour or two, you can still launch a large number of attacks in that time,” he said. “And then they just keep coming back and opening new cloud accounts.”

MERCENARIES TEAM

Stark Industries is incorporated at a mail drop address in the United Kingdom. UK business records list an Ivan Vladimirovich Neculiti as the company’s secretary. Mr. Neculiti also is named as the CEO and founder of PQ Hosting Plus S.R.L. (aka Perfect Quality Hosting), a Moldovan company formed in 2019 that lists the same UK mail drop address as Stark Industries.

Reached via LinkedIn, Mr. Neculiti said PQ Hosting established Stark Industries as a “white label” of its brand so that “resellers could distribute our services using our IP addresses and their clients would not have any affairs with PQ Hosting.”

“PQ Hosting is a company with over 1,000+ of [our] own physical servers in 38 countries and we have over 100,000 clients,” he said. “Though we are not as large as Hetzner, Amazon and OVH, nevertheless we are a fast growing company that provides services to tens of thousands of private customers and legal entities.”

Asked about the constant stream of DDoS attacks whose origins have traced back to Stark Industries over the past two years, Neculiti maintained Stark hasn’t received any official abuse reports about attacks coming from its networks.

“It was probably some kind of clever attack that we did not see, I do not rule out this fact, because we have a very large number of clients and our Internet channels are quite large,” he said. “But, in this situation, unfortunately, no one contacted us to report that there was an attack from our addresses; if someone had contacted us, we would have definitely blocked the network data.”

DomainTools.com finds Ivan V. Neculiti was the owner of war[.]md, a website launched in 2008 that chronicled the history of a 1990 armed conflict in Moldova known as the Transnistria War and the Moldo-Russian war.

Transnistria is a breakaway pro-Russian region that declared itself a state in 1990, although it is not internationally recognized. The copyright on that website credits the “MercenarieS TeaM,” which was at one time a Moldovan IT firm. Mr. Neculiti confirmed personally registering this domain.

DON CHICHO & DFYZ

The data breach tracking service Constella Intelligence reports that an Ivan V. Neculiti registered multiple online accounts under the email address dfyz_bk@bk.ru. Cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 shows this email address is tied to the username “dfyz” on more than a half-dozen Russian language cybercrime forums since 2008. The user dfyz on Searchengines[.]ru in 2008 asked other forum members to review war.md, and said they were part of the MercenarieS TeaM.

Back then, dfyz was selling “bulletproof servers for any purpose,” meaning the hosting company would willfully ignore abuse complaints or police inquiries about the activity of its customers.

DomainTools reports there are at least 33 domain names registered to dfyz_bk@bk.ru. Several of these domains have Ivan Neculiti in their registration records, including tracker-free[.]cn, which was registered to an Ivan Neculiti at dfyz_bk@bk.ru and referenced the MercenarieS TeaM in its original registration records.

Dfyz also used the nickname DonChicho, who likewise sold bulletproof hosting services and access to hacked Internet servers. In 2014, a prominent member of the Russian language cybercrime community Antichat filed a complaint against DonChicho, saying this user scammed them and had used the email address dfyz_bk@bk.ru.

The complaint said DonChicho registered on Antichat from the Transnistria Internet address 84.234.55[.]29. Searching this address in Constella reveals it has been used to register just five accounts online that have been created over the years, including one at ask.ru, where the user registered with the email address neculitzy1@yandex.ru. Constella also returns for that email address a user by the name “Ivan” at memoraleak.com and 000webhost.com.

Constella finds that the password most frequently used by the email address dfyz_bk@bk.ru was “filecast,” and that there are more than 90 email addresses associated with this password. Among them are roughly two dozen addresses with the name “Neculiti” in them, as well as the address support@donservers[.]ru.

Intel 471 says DonChicho posted to several Russian cybercrime forums that support@donservers[.]ru was his address, and that he logged into cybercrime forums almost exclusively from Internet addresses in Tiraspol, the capital of Transnistria. A review of DonChicho’s posts shows this person was banned from several forums in 2014 for scamming other users.

Cached copies of DonChicho’s vanity domain (donchicho[.]ru) show that in 2009 he was a spammer who peddled knockoff prescription drugs via Rx-Promotion, once one of the largest pharmacy spam moneymaking programs for Russian-speaking affiliates.

Mr. Neculiti told KrebsOnSecurity he has never used the nickname DonChicho.

“I may assure you that I have no relation to DonChicho nor to his bulletproof servers,” he said.

Below is a mind map that shows the connections between the accounts mentioned above.

Earlier this year, NoName began massively hitting government and industry websites in Moldova. A new report from Arbor Networks says the attacks began around March 6, when NoName alleged the government of Moldova was “craving for Russophobia.”

“Since early March, more than 50 websites have been targeted, according to posted ‘proof’ by the groups involved in attacking the country,” Arbor’s ASERT Team wrote. “While NoName seemingly initiated the ramp of attacks, a host of other DDoS hacktivists have joined the fray in claiming credit for attacks across more than 15 industries.”

CORRECTIV ACTION

The German independent news outlet Correctiv.org last week published a scathing investigative report on Stark Industries and MIRhosting, which notes that Ivan Neculiti operates his hosting companies with the help of his brother, Yuri.

The report points out that Stark Industries continues to host a Russian disinformation news outlet called “Recent Reliable News” (RRN) that was sanctioned by the European Union in 2023 for spreading links to propaganda blogs and fake European media and government websites.

“The website was not running on computers in Moscow or St. Petersburg until recently, but in the middle of the EU, in the Netherlands, on the computers of the Neculiti brothers,” Correctiv reporters wrote.

“After a request from this editorial team, a well-known service was installed that hides the actual web host,” the report continues. “Ivan Neculiti announced that he had blocked the associated access and server following internal investigations. “We very much regret that we are only now finding out that one of our customers is a sanctioned portal,” said the company boss. However, RRN is still accessible via its servers.”

Correctiv also points to a January 2023 report from the Ukrainian government, which found servers from Stark Industries Solutions were used as part of a cyber attack on the Ukrainian news agency “Ukrinform”. Correctiv notes the notorious hacker group Sandworm — an advanced persistent threat (APT) group operated by a cyberwarfare unit of Russia’s military intelligence service — was identified by Ukrainian government authorities as responsible for that attack.

PEACE HOSTING?

Public records indicate MIRhosting is based in The Netherlands and is operated by 37-year old Andrey Nesterenko, whose personal website says he is an accomplished concert pianist who began performing publicly at a young age.

DomainTools says mirhosting[.]com is registered to Mr. Nesterenko and to Innovation IT Solutions Corp, which lists addresses in London and in Nesterenko’s stated hometown of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.

This is interesting because according to the book Inside Cyber Warfare by Jeffrey Carr, Innovation IT Solutions Corp. was responsible for hosting StopGeorgia[.]ru, a hacktivist website for organizing cyberattacks against Georgia that appeared at the same time Russian forces invaded the former Soviet nation in 2008. That conflict was thought to be the first war ever fought in which a notable cyberattack and an actual military engagement happened simultaneously.

Responding to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, Mr. Nesterenko said he couldn’t say whether his network had ever hosted the StopGeorgia website back in 2008 because his company didn’t keep records going back that far. But he said Stark Industries Solutions is indeed one of MIRhsoting’s colocation customers.

“Our relationship is purely provider-customer,” Nesterenko said. “They also utilize multiple providers and data centers globally, so connecting them directly to MIRhosting overlooks their broader network.”

“We take any report of malicious activity seriously and are always open to information that can help us identify and prevent misuse of our infrastructure, whether involving Stark Industries or any other customer,” Nesterenko continued. “In cases where our services are exploited for malicious purposes, we collaborate fully with Dutch cyber police and other relevant authorities to investigate and take appropriate measures. However, we have yet to receive any actionable information beyond the article itself, which has not provided us with sufficient detail to identify or block malicious actors.”

In December 2022, security firm Recorded Future profiled the phishing and credential harvesting infrastructure used for Russia-aligned espionage operations by a group dubbed Blue Charlie (aka TAG-53), which has targeted email accounts of nongovernmental organizations and think tanks, journalists, and government and defense officials.

Recorded Future found that virtually all the Blue Charlie domains existed in just ten different ISPs, with a significant concentration located in two networks, one of which was MIRhosting. Both Microsoft and the UK government assess that Blue Charlie is linked to the Russian threat activity groups variously known as Callisto Group, COLDRIVER, and SEABORGIUM.

Mr. Nesterenko took exception to a story on that report from The Record, which is owned by Recorded Future.

“We’ve discussed its contents with our customer, Stark Industries,” he said. “We understand that they have initiated legal proceedings against the website in question, as they firmly believe that the claims made are inaccurate.”

Recorded Future said they updated their story with comments from Mr. Neculiti, but that they stand by their reporting.

Mr. Nesterenko’s LinkedIn profile says he was previously the foreign region sales manager at Serverius-as, a hosting company in The Netherlands that remains in the same data center as MIRhosting.

In February, the Dutch police took 13 servers offline that were used by the infamous LockBit ransomware group, which had originally bragged on its darknet website that its home base was in The Netherlands. Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity the servers seized by the Dutch police were located in Serverius’ data center in Dronten, which is also shared by MIRhosting.

Serverius-as did not respond to requests for comment. Nesterenko said MIRhosting does use one of Serverius’s data centers for its operations in the Netherlands, alongside two other data centers, but that the recent incident involving the seizure of servers has no connection to MIRhosting.

“We are legally prohibited by Dutch law and police regulations from sharing information with third parties regarding any communications we may have had,” he said.

A February 2024 report from security firm ESET found Serverius-as systems were involved in a series of targeted phishing attacks by Russia-aligned groups against Ukrainian entities throughout 2023. ESET observed that after the spearphishing domains were no longer active, they were converted to promoting rogue Internet pharmacy websites.

PEERING INTO THE VOID

A review of the Internet address ranges recently added to the network operated by Stark Industries Solutions offers some insight into its customer base, usage, and maybe even true origins. Here is a snapshot (PDF) of all Internet address ranges announced by Stark Industries so far in the month of May 2024 (this information was graciously collated by the network observability platform Kentik.com).

Those records indicate that the largest portion of the IP space used by Stark is in The Netherlands, followed by Germany and the United States. Stark says it is connected to roughly 4,600 Internet addresses that currently list their ownership as Comcast Cable Communications.

A review of those address ranges at spur.us shows all of them are connected to an entity called Proxyline, which is a sprawling proxy service based in Russia that currently says it has more than 1.6 million proxies globally that are available for rent.

Reached for comment, Comcast said the Internet address ranges never did belong to Comcast, so it is likely that Stark has been fudging the real location of its routing announcements in some cases.

Stark reports that it has more than 67,000 Internet addresses at Santa Clara, Calif.-based EGIhosting. Spur says the Stark addresses involving EGIhosting all map to Proxyline as well. EGIhosting did not respond to requests for comment.

EGIhosting manages Internet addresses for the Cyprus-based hosting firm ITHOSTLINE LTD (aka HOSTLINE-LTD), which is represented throughout Stark’s announced Internet ranges. Stark says it has more than 21,000 Internet addresses with HOSTLINE. Spur.us finds Proxyline addresses are especially concentrated in the Stark ranges labeled ITHOSTLINE LTD, HOSTLINE-LTD, and Proline IT.

Stark’s network list includes approximately 21,000 Internet addresses at Hockessin, De. based DediPath, which abruptly ceased operations without warning in August 2023. According to a phishing report released last year by Interisle Consulting, DediPath was the fourth most common source of phishing attacks in the year ending Oct. 2022. Spur.us likewise finds that virtually all of the Stark address ranges marked “DediPath LLC” are tied to Proxyline.

A large number of the Internet address ranges announced by Stark in May originate in India, and the names that are self-assigned to many of these networks indicate they were previously used to send large volumes of spam for herbal medicinal products, with names like HerbalFarm, AdsChrome, Nutravo, Herbzoot and Herbalve.

The anti-spam organization SpamHaus reports that many of the Indian IP address ranges are associated with known “snowshoe spam,” a form of abuse that involves mass email campaigns spread across several domains and IP addresses to weaken reputation metrics and avoid spam filters.

It’s not clear how much of Stark’s network address space traces its origins to Russia, but big chunks of it recently belonged to some of the oldest entities on the Russian Internet (a.k.a. “Runet”).

For example, many Stark address ranges were most recently assigned to a Russian government entity whose full name is the “Federal State Autonomous Educational Establishment of Additional Professional Education Center of Realization of State Educational Policy and Informational Technologies.”

A review of Internet address ranges adjacent to this entity reveals a long list of Russian government organizations that are part of the Federal Guard Service of the Russian Federation. Wikipedia says the Federal Guard Service is a Russian federal government agency concerned with tasks related to protection of several high-ranking state officials, including the President of Russia, as well as certain federal properties. The agency traces its origins to the USSR’s Ninth Directorate of the KGB, and later the presidential security service.

Stark recently announced the address range 213.159.64.0/20 from April 27 to May 1, and this range was previously assigned to an ancient ISP in St. Petersburg, RU called the Computer Technologies Institute Ltd.

According to a post on the Russian language webmaster forum searchengines[.]ru, the domain for Computer Technologies Institute — ctinet[.]ru — is the seventh-oldest domain in the entire history of the Runet.

Curiously, Stark also lists large tracts of Internet addresses (close to 48,000 in total) assigned to a small ISP in Kharkiv, Ukraine called NetAssist. Reached via email, the CEO of NetAssist Max Tulyev confirmed his company provides a number of services to PQ Hosting.

“We colocate their equipment in Warsaw, Madrid, Sofia and Thessaloniki, provide them IP transit and IPv4 addresses,” Tulyev said. “For their size, we receive relatively low number of complains to their networks. I never seen anything about their pro-Russian activity or support of Russian hackers. It is very interesting for me to see proofs of your accusations.”

Spur.us mapped the entire infrastructure of Proxyline, and found more than one million proxies across multiple providers, but by far the biggest concentration was at Stark Industries Solutions. The full list of Proxyline address ranges (.CSV) shows two other ISPs appear repeatedly throughout the list. One is Kharkiv, Ukraine based ITL LLC, also known as Information Technology Laboratories Group, and Integrated Technologies Laboratory.

The second is a related hosting company in Miami, called Green Floid LLC. Green Floid featured in a 2017 scoop by CNN, which profiled the company’s owner and quizzed him about Russian troll farms using proxy networks on Green Floid and its parent firm ITL to mask disinformation efforts tied to the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). At the time, the IRA was using Facebook and other social media networks to spread videos showing police brutality against African Americans in an effort to encourage protests across the United States.

Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Kentik, was able to see at a high level the top sources and destinations for traffic traversing Stark’s network.

“Based on our aggregate NetFlow, we see Iran as the top destination (35.1%) for traffic emanating from Stark (AS44477),” Madory said. “Specifically, the top destination is MTN Irancell, while the top source is Facebook. This data supports the theory that AS44477 houses proxy services as Facebook is blocked in Iran.”

On April 30, the security firm Malwarebytes explored an extensive malware operation that targets corporate Internet users with malicious ads. Among the sites used as lures in that campaign were fake Wall Street Journal and CNN websites that told visitors they were required to install a WSJ or CNN-branded browser extension (malware). Malwarebytes found a domain name central to that operation was hosted at Internet addresses owned by Stark Industries.

Why Your Wi-Fi Router Doubles as an Apple AirTag

Apple and the satellite-based broadband service Starlink each recently took steps to address new research into the potential security and privacy implications of how their services geo-locate devices. Researchers from the University of Maryland say they relied on publicly available data from Apple to track the location of billions of devices globally — including non-Apple devices like Starlink systems — and found they could use this data to monitor the destruction of Gaza, as well as the movements and in many cases identities of Russian and Ukrainian troops.

At issue is the way that Apple collects and publicly shares information about the precise location of all Wi-Fi access points seen by its devices. Apple collects this location data to give Apple devices a crowdsourced, low-power alternative to constantly requesting global positioning system (GPS) coordinates.

Both Apple and Google operate their own Wi-Fi-based Positioning Systems (WPS) that obtain certain hardware identifiers from all wireless access points that come within range of their mobile devices. Both record the Media Access Control (MAC) address that a Wi-FI access point uses, known as a Basic Service Set Identifier or BSSID.

Periodically, Apple and Google mobile devices will forward their locations — by querying GPS and/or by using cellular towers as landmarks — along with any nearby BSSIDs. This combination of data allows Apple and Google devices to figure out where they are within a few feet or meters, and it’s what allows your mobile phone to continue displaying your planned route even when the device can’t get a fix on GPS.

With Google’s WPS, a wireless device submits a list of nearby Wi-Fi access point BSSIDs and their signal strengths — via an application programming interface (API) request to Google — whose WPS responds with the device’s computed position. Google’s WPS requires at least two BSSIDs to calculate a device’s approximate position.

Apple’s WPS also accepts a list of nearby BSSIDs, but instead of computing the device’s location based off the set of observed access points and their received signal strengths and then reporting that result to the user, Apple’s API will return the geolocations of up to 400 hundred more BSSIDs that are nearby the one requested. It then uses approximately eight of those BSSIDs to work out the user’s location based on known landmarks.

In essence, Google’s WPS computes the user’s location and shares it with the device. Apple’s WPS gives its devices a large enough amount of data about the location of known access points in the area that the devices can do that estimation on their own.

That’s according to two researchers at the University of Maryland, who theorized they could use the verbosity of Apple’s API to map the movement of individual devices into and out of virtually any defined area of the world. The UMD pair said they spent a month early in their research continuously querying the API, asking it for the location of more than a billion BSSIDs generated at random.

They learned that while only about three million of those randomly generated BSSIDs were known to Apple’s Wi-Fi geolocation API, Apple also returned an additional 488 million BSSID locations already stored in its WPS from other lookups.

UMD Associate Professor David Levin and Ph.D student Erik Rye found they could mostly avoid requesting unallocated BSSIDs by consulting the list of BSSID ranges assigned to specific device manufacturers. That list is maintained by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which is also sponsoring the privacy and security conference where Rye is slated to present the UMD research later today.

Plotting the locations returned by Apple’s WPS between November 2022 and November 2023, Levin and Rye saw they had a near global view of the locations tied to more than two billion Wi-Fi access points. The map showed geolocated access points in nearly every corner of the globe, apart from almost the entirety of China, vast stretches of desert wilderness in central Australia and Africa, and deep in the rainforests of South America.

The researchers said that by zeroing in on or “geofencing” other smaller regions indexed by Apple’s location API, they could monitor how Wi-Fi access points moved over time. Why might that be a big deal? They found that by geofencing active conflict zones in Ukraine, they were able to determine the location and movement of Starlink devices used by both Ukrainian and Russian forces.

The reason they were able to do that is that each Starlink terminal — the dish and associated hardware that allows a Starlink customer to receive Internet service from a constellation of orbiting Starlink satellites — includes its own Wi-Fi access point, whose location is going to be automatically indexed by any nearby Apple devices that have location services enabled.

The University of Maryland team geo-fenced various conflict zones in Ukraine, and identified at least 3,722 Starlink terminals geolocated in Ukraine.

“We find what appear to be personal devices being brought by military personnel into war zones, exposing pre-deployment sites and military positions,” the researchers wrote. “Our results also show individuals who have left Ukraine to a wide range of countries, validating public reports of where Ukrainian refugees have resettled.”

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, the UMD team said they found that in addition to exposing Russian troop pre-deployment sites, the location data made it easy to see where devices in contested regions originated from.

“This includes residential addresses throughout the world,” Levin said. “We even believe we can identify people who have joined the Ukraine Foreign Legion.”

Levin and Rye said they shared their findings with Starlink in March 2024, and that Starlink told them the company began shipping software updates in 2023 that force Starlink access points to randomize their BSSIDs.

Starlink’s parent SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment. But the researchers shared a graphic they said was created from their Starlink BSSID monitoring data, which shows that just in the past month there was a substantial drop in the number of Starlink devices that were geo-locatable using Apple’s API.

They also shared a written statement they received from Starlink, which acknowledged that Starlink User Terminal routers originally used a static BSSID/MAC:

“In early 2023 a software update was released that randomized the main router BSSID. Subsequent software releases have included randomization of the BSSID of WiFi repeaters associated with the main router. Software updates that include the repeater randomization functionality are currently being deployed fleet-wide on a region-by-region basis. We believe the data outlined in your paper is based on Starlink main routers and or repeaters that were queried prior to receiving these randomization updates.”

The researchers also focused their geofencing on the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, and were able to track the migration and disappearance of devices throughout the Gaza Strip as Israeli forces cut power to the country and bombing campaigns knocked out key infrastructure.

“As time progressed, the number of Gazan BSSIDs that are geolocatable continued to decline,” they wrote. “By the end of the month, only 28% of the original BSSIDs were still found in the Apple WPS.”

In late March 2024, Apple quietly updated its website to note that anyone can opt out of having the location of their wireless access points collected and shared by Apple — by appending “_nomap” to the end of the Wi-Fi access point’s name (SSID). Adding “_nomap” to your Wi-Fi network name also blocks Google from indexing its location.

Asked about the changes, Apple said they have respected the “_nomap” flag on SSIDs for some time, but that this was only called out in a support article earlier this year.

Rye said Apple’s response addressed the most depressing aspect of their research: That there was previously no way for anyone to opt out of this data collection.

“You may not have Apple products, but if you have an access point and someone near you owns an Apple device, your BSSID will be in [Apple’s] database,” he said. “What’s important to note here is that every access point is being tracked, without opting in, whether they run an Apple device or not. Only after we disclosed this to Apple have they added the ability for people to opt out.”

The researchers said they hope Apple will consider additional safeguards, such as proactive ways to limit abuses of its location API.

“It’s a good first step,” Levin said of Apple’s privacy update in March. “But this data represents a really serious privacy vulnerability. I would hope Apple would put further restrictions on the use of its API, like rate-limiting these queries to keep people from accumulating massive amounts of data like we did.”

The UMD researchers said they omitted certain details from their study to protect the users they were able to track, noting that the methods they used could present risks for those fleeing abusive relationships or stalkers.

“We observe routers move between cities and countries, potentially representing their owner’s relocation or a business transaction between an old and new owner,” they wrote. “While there is not necessarily a 1-to-1 relationship between Wi-Fi routers and users, home routers typically only have several. If these users are vulnerable populations, such as those fleeing intimate partner violence or a stalker, their router simply being online can disclose their new location.”

The researchers said Wi-Fi access points that can be created using a mobile device’s built-in cellular modem do not create a location privacy risk for their users because mobile phone hotspots will choose a random BSSID when activated.

“Modern Android and iOS devices will choose a random BSSID when you go into hotspot mode,” he said. “Hotspots are already implementing the strongest recommendations for privacy protections. It’s other types of devices that don’t do that.”

For example, they discovered that certain commonly used travel routers compound the potential privacy risks.

“Because travel routers are frequently used on campers or boats, we see a significant number of them move between campgrounds, RV parks, and marinas,” the UMD duo wrote. “They are used by vacationers who move between residential dwellings and hotels. We have evidence of their use by military members as they deploy from their homes and bases to war zones.”

A copy of the UMD research is available here (PDF).

Update, May 22, 4:54 p.m. ET: Added response from Apple.